I loved The Space Between Worlds when I read it many years ago. I recommended it widely and sang its praises, so I was very excited when the publisher offered me an advance copy of the long awaited sequel, Those Beyond the Wall. If what I say here sounds interesting to you though, read The Space Between Worlds, (and actually, if it’s been a minute since you read The Space Between Worlds, I’d recommend going in for a reread before diving in here) as this is a true sequel that will assume you’ve read the first, and have a lot less to offer you if you haven’t read it.

I love Johnson’s word building, which continues to feel real, true, and fresh, even in the sequel. Sometimes second books lack some of the wonder and propulsive curiosity that drives the first as the world has already been fully explored. Not this sequel. I could feel the dirt and the dust, see the sparkling skylines, and smell the blood. As a warning: this book does have a decent amount of blood, guts, and body horror, but it never feels gratuitous or unearned.

The thing that I think this book does the best is complexity. The characters are complicated--they have trauma, they have desires, and sometimes they want one thing one moment and another the next. They feel like real, complicated, messy people. There is nothing as simple as a one way redemption arc here--they take hesitant steps towards improvement and then they backslide. It’s also not a book that’s going to make you feel comforted or satisfied at the end of it. You’re going to be asking questions. You’ll probably not know exactly how you feel about it. If you like N.K. Jemison, The Expanse, or A Memory Called Empire, I’d give this one a shot.

This book is also unapologetically genre, and genre at its best. It doesn’t hedge by saying it’s “elevated genre” or “literary genre” or “lit fic with a genre twist.” This book is clearly written by an author who loves genre, for people who love genre. Johnson is a rising star and I can’t wait to see where she goes next.

The publisher gave me an advance copy on NetGalley in exchange for this honest review.

(To Post March 1 on Instagram, Goodreads, and blog)

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.
This particular book is a vastly different vibe than its predecessor. That book was science and morality. This book is rage, at the world and the system. The author, in her forward, warns of the rage. I very much felt the reason for her rage came through in every chapter. That being said, the first book gives the expectation of a certain type of book and that expectation is not delivered here. Less science and more thoughts and feelings. I liked it, just not quite as much as I had hoped.

This novel is viscously sharp and incredibly timely - the author opens the book with a note on how the story was born of rage, and this feeling is never not simmering below the page, occasionally bursting into gouts of open flame. I enjoyed how the story opens with a time jump - it is set about 10 years after the events of the first novel, and exists in a word that has both been changed by the past and resistant to it. I loved Scales as a protagonists, and as much as I missed Cara and Dell I didn't feel their loss, as excited I was by the new cast of characters. The shift to following Nik Nik and his crew was surprising but gave a whole new level of perspective to the story and challenged a lot of my initial assumptions about the running of their ragtag empire. Johnson has created a science fiction novel that does not exist apart from our modern world but rather relies heavily on its geopolitics and problems, inciting powerful commentary about police brutality, racism, and class violence.

"Don't you just hate it? When you think you're reading a tory about science, and it turns out it's been a story about magic all along?"

Though I read "Space Between Worlds" less than a year ago, this book took a bit longer to warm up and re-orient myself. I was confused about Mr. Scales and didn't remember her from the previous novel. The storylines blossomed and characters developed in very interesting ways. I love the diversity of gender expression, the fact that mostly I have no idea what people look like.

I am giving this story 4/5 stars because I still have a lot of questions related to the size and scope of the world outside Wiley-Ashtown -- are there any other cities? Nations? Do they have their own multi-versal issues? Where do they get their power? Is it solar? Are the vehicles solar? The wastelands have caves and a bog -- and it seems like they have access to the ocean. Are there no sea-faring people? While there are drones - no airplanes, kites or gliders. There are tasers and "stunners" but only one secret, illicit gun. People favor knives and beatings for their violence (and motor vehicles).


Mr Scales is still young and growing -- still working through her issues but she is committed to remembering lessons learned and keeping an open. mind. Some quotes:

"Bitterness is anger with nowhere to go. Bitterness and resignation are close and tempting cousins. Anger with a target is Rage, and Rage is sister to Hope alone. We rage because we do believe things can be better, by fire if necessary."

"The true test of a runner is how expertly you can shut the fuck up."

"Don't mourn what you outgrow."

"We don't live in a place where nonviolence is an option, but you are precisely the person who needs to be holding the sword."

"Runners love their rides because we know what everyone else wants to forget: The line between hot stuttering machine and the human body is thin enough to barely see light through."

"Sometimes, villains are precisely what the future wants."

"This is how we can peacefully coexist [...] when one entity doesn't hold the existence of the other inits firm grasp."

I'm sorry to report, I did not finish this book. I hate that.
I tried but found the writing uninspired.
I tried to ignore that and just follow the story.
There were many characters. In a few cases, a character was really more than one.
The pandering to LGBTQ+ "them/they" made it impossible to follow who was who.
I give it 1 star. I think there was a unique storyline, but the characters were too difficult to care about.
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3.5*
I headed into Those Beyond the Wall fresh off my The Space Between Worlds reread. The Space Between Worlds still remains one of my favourite science-fiction book that expertly weave (exacerbated? how far off are we really) race and class disparity in a future setting and multiverse travelling with a slow burn sapphic romance and twists to keep you hooked.

Those Beyond the Wall is different: it takes place ten years into the future where we follow Mr Scales a runner we got a glimpse of in the Space Between World but remember so little of the final events that it made me question if I had correctly read her presence in the first one. It's a first person, almost stream of consciouness that unlike the first one is all about emotions over plot. Even when I had finished the book I struggled to tell you what exactly was the plot. Things happen and Mr Scales doesn't really care so I had no idea what the "villains" were doing and why so it kills the tnesion that is supposedly building up. But it is after all a book written in anger according to the foreword so the emotional shift makes sense.

The narrative build around love, Mr Scale, guilt and being deserving of it had me enthralled especially as the book subtly destroy our image of Mr Cheek (I think he's supposed to be kinda redeemed after the emotional confrontation but it just made he feel like even more like a jerk to me). In opposition, we're supposed to gradually learn to love Cross but I didn't like the guy in the first one and I'm not starting now. I'm not sure jumping straight into a new romantic entagnlement was a move for a character whose narrative is build around love, self-love, heartbreak and guilt but I'm biased against that guy.

However, Mr Scale remains a less compelling protagonist than Cara (who has her cameo) who knew how to lead the plot. She has her moments but overall every Cara moment made me regret her. The twists of Mr Scale's identity (like Cara's was one) felt less impactful and carried less tension despite all they could have been.

It's a good book that almost tidies up all the loose threads from the first one but does lose its tight scifi elements into an almost "magic" side plot

Thank you to netgalley and the publisher for letting me read this sequel to The Space Between Worlds!

You can tell that the author used real world events with personal meaning as inspiration for this book, and I think that made everything so much more meaningful. It did take me a bit to get back into the flow of the world and storytelling, because the protagonist is new and not a lot of re-capping goes on to start, but I found myself picking things back up fairly easily once I got back into it.

Overall, I thought the story was great, the characters were interesting, and the message was good.

The Space Between Worlds by the same author is one of my favorite books of all time so I was so incredibly excited to see that Micaiah Johnson was putting out another book. I will admit, I hadn’t read The Space Between Worlds for a couple of years and went into Those Beyond the Wall not realizing it was a sequel to The Space Between Worlds. After a couple of chapters, I realized and went back and read the first one and I’m so glad I did. I will say, for all the intensity of The Space Between Worlds, it seems like child’s play compared to Those Beyond the Wall.
Those Beyond the Wall takes place 10 years after The Space Between Worlds and follows the runner Mr Scales. Mr Scales is close with Mr Cheeks (who is in the first book a few times) and has a mysterious type of relationship with the Emperor Nik Nik. I really liked learning more about the runners and spending the majority of the book inside Ashtown instead of Wiley. I felt the rage/frustration of our main character as she witnesses the atrocities Wiley is fine with Ashtown and their people suffering. The parallel between the book and our world is clear and powerful.
Queerness and queer relationships play a big role in this world and I am glad that it is so accepted by Ashtown and is a huge part of their identities. I will read anything this author puts out and I really recommend everyone else does too.

this was enjoyable after book one. I’ve never heard of the author or this before so I was pleasantly surprised to have been approved for an arc.

This book was very angry and I could feel the anger radiating off each page. I mean I read the foreword, but it didn’t prepare me for what was between the pages.

Giving Those Beyond The Wall a star rating has been a huge challenge for me. I've been struggling working through this sci-fi novel for weeks at this point. What follows is about my personal subjective experience of this book, not its objective merit.

Those Beyond The Wall is the second book set inside the universe of Micaiah Johnson's debut, The Space Between Worlds. It has a different protagonist, so it's not a sequel in the strictest sense. But reading The Space Between Worlds before Those Beyond The Wall wouldn't hurt if you are considering picking this up.

Those Beyond The Wall is sci-fi about real-world issues that are deeply personal to the author. She has a very important message and experience that should be heard. The novel includes references to real-world events from the past decade throughout the novel, starting with the author's note at the beginning of the book.

The references to real-world events were at times so thinly veiled that my mind would immediately get pulled out of the story, and I would start thinking about politics, race, resistance movements in the US, and a variety of disturbing but very real events from the last ten years or so. Every time I got pulled out of the story , it took me a serious amount of time and effort to get into the flow of the story again.

If my thoughts drifted off to a real-world event for even just one sentence while reading Those Beyond The Wall, I would miss some detail. This then made it very hard to understand what was going on in the story.

Still, I was determined to get into the novel. I restarted this book five or six times. And yet none of my efforts were enough to make Those Beyond The Wall clear and engaging enough to become an enjoyable experience for me.

Many thanks to the author, Del Rey and Penguin Random House for providing me with a free ARC.

Those beyond the Wall did start off slow for me but as I kept going and learned more about the main character and learned more about the world around them, I started to get hooked into it and had to keep going to find out what happens. Its a great book with details that help the imagination go wild as you read the book. I can say for my first type of this genre i am absolutely blown away and cant wait to read more books from this author.

I absolutely loved the first book, so I was excited for this one. It was good to visit this world again, but this book leaned heavily into my least favorite parts of the first one.

A huge plot point was more magic than sci-fi and very confusing. I wish that part was a much bigger part of the book because it’s what I loved about the previous book. I wish the world building was a smaller part of the story to delve into how this “magic” aspect worked. It was just a few pages of stream-of-consciousness that l didn’t enjoy. This one felt disjointed and much darker. The author did say at the beginning that it was full of rage, and it was! I also devoured this book, so it wasn’t all bad, just not my favorite.

Review posts on March 13th, 2024.

THOSE BEYOND THE WALL is a stunning follow-up to THE SPACE BETWEEN WORLDS, building on many of the same themes of classism, racism, xenophobia, protection, abuse, and exploitation from a very different angle. It tells the story of an Ashtown runner trying to stop an existential threat from another world without being trampled by the city of Wiley in the process.

This focuses on Ashtown and its power structures through the perspective of Mr. Scales, a runner who is close friends with Mr. Cheeks and can’t stand former Ruralite, Mr. Cross. Scales is an engaging and somewhat unreliable narrator, using the idea of truth and stories in a metatexual way to complicate her tale, while engaging with the essence of what happened.

The main storyline is new, set up by events in the previous book, but at a distance of years, and with a different main character, which makes a huge difference to the tone and feel of the book. THE SPACE BETWEEN WORLDS established the idea that in order to travel between worlds, you can only go to a place where your doppelgänger is dead. This means that many white, rich (or even just middle-class) people in Wiley were likely to be alive on too many worlds to make good travelers. This meant that poor, brown, Ashtowners who had been exploited for generations were recruited to be travelers. In THOSE BEYOND THE WALL, Scales is differently concerned with power. She's not asking Wiley city for legitimacy or recognition. Her understanding of the give-and-take of power in relationships doesn’t shy away from the pervasive nature of power dynamics, and she's willing to manipulate the flow of that power as much as she's aware of it. Scales is a fascinating and mostly (but not completely) trustworthy narrator. She seems to be telling the story from the perspective of being at its end and relaying what happened, something not uncommon for first person narratives, though the way she omits, elides, or shifts around information means there's room for some future narrator to disagree with her telling.

I like how deliberately sex work positive this book is. It goes beyond the presence of the House, and the importance of Exlee, deliberately pushing back against the bigoted attitudes of the ruralites, and a former ruralite in particular.

THOSE BEYOND THE WALL can probably be read on its own, with the relevant backstory explained succinctly enough to make sense to anyone who hasn't read THE SPACE BETWEEN WORLDS, or serving as a welcome refresher to anyone for whom it's been a while. As a sort-of sequel, this gives updates and closure for many of the significant characters from the first book. For some, those answers are found in their deaths, but for many of them, this is the story of what happens when Ashtown has to protect themselves from other worlds, and from the classist xenophobes in the city who have benefited from and upheld an apartheid regime. The specific plot would make sense to someone who hadn’t read the first one, partly because it’s a completely different narrator with a completely different perspective on those events, which allows Scales to be an entry point for someone who knows nothing about the first book. However, the ending of THOSE BEYOND THE WALL provides closure to several things that are emotionally left open at the end of THE SPACE BETWEEN WORLDS. Getting those answers without having asked a question is much less satisfying than it would be for someone who has reason to care about those details. Also, now that I’ve read this, I need to go do a reread of both books in order, because characters who are very important here had different levels of importance in that first book, but I’m pretty sure several of them were present there, beyond the obvious ones like Nik Nik and Cara. Scales has a completely different relationship to Nik Nik than Cara did, in a way that’s fascinating but never let me forget that even the less abusive version of Nik Nik is soaked in death and violence. When looking at sequels, tracking changes in narrative voice has felt more and more perfunctory as I’ve read books that keep the same narrator across the series or have broadly similar ideological goals, such that they’re working in similar directions. This was not the case for THOSE BEYOND THE WALL. Mr. Scales is not the same person as Cara from the first book. They have such fundamentally disparate perspectives that they may as well have grown up in different worlds, even if they technically are from the same one. I’m pretty certain that this particular world is the same one where Cara and Dell made their stand against Adam, but even if I'm wrong about that it doesn't matter much for the experience of reading THOSE BEYOND THE WALL. By closely interacting with an all-consuming and abusive person at different stages of his life, both Cara and Scales were shaped by their relationships to Nik Nik in ways that left indelible marks, but he is so different with each of them that they're unable to relate to each other's experiences as if they were with the same person. Given all the parallel worlds, it probably isn't even technically the same man, but I'd need to do a much closer read (and maybe make a chart or spreadsheet) in order to be certain.

I don’t know if this will be the last book, it feels like it could be, and I hope, for the characters' sakes, that what happens next isn’t exciting enough to require someone to be a main character ever again. That being said, I will happily devoured any and all books set in this world, as they are truly stunning.

So, I will preface this review by saying that I had absolutely no idea this was a continuation of The Space Between Worlds. This isn't just a book in the same universe, but an actual sequel and I do wish that the Netgalley summary had made that a bit more clear.

With that, I found this book very hard to enjoy and comprehend. It made it difficult for me to enjoy the reading experience. Maybe will pick it up again after reading the first book.

I greatly appreciate Netgalley and the publisher for allowing me an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thanks to NetGalley for the eARC of this novel. It is a sequel to the Space Between Worlds. There is no regurgitation of the events of the prior novel, so you may want to reread it first. I was confused for about the first 30% of the novel because of this.

The story is told in the first person from Mr. Scales, in a stream of consciousness style. This means there is a lot of extraneous detail and that the MCs somewhat self-destructive inner monologue is repeated throughout. The plot is meandering as well. I do not think the plot or the character of Mr. Scales is the point. Instead this story is about a victimized world that finds a new leader. The politics of the story were distracting because they did not make sense. Ashtown was a hyper-violent society that nevertheless recognizes trans rights and makes sure no one is feeling depressed. I understand this is sci fi but those things never go together. The author has a forward where she explains she was very angry from her recent activism when she wrote the book. That definitely comes through, but almost too well because I felt like I was reading a pamphlet or at a rally or on Tik Tok. The first book was so propulsive. This one feels more like a long rant with a particular point of view. The author can write but it didn't come through for me the same way this time.

So this ended up being a unique way to be introduced to the world from Micaiah's first book, as I had not read it yet, and wasn't expecting this to be a direct sequel (in that it focuses on characters from the world). That said, while that was a major detriment coming into this book, it still won me over hard, and now I'll be reading The Space Between the Worlds as one of my first books of 2024! I love the world that Johnson gave us, and the characters were all fucking fascinating, and watching this unfold was just a joy to read in the closing days of '23. Plus, big ups to anyone who quotes The Mountain Goats in their section openers. One of my first auto-recommends for books coming out in '24.

I loved ever minute of this story. The passion and anger of injustice bled from the pages. It hit hard on so many things. I felt it to my very core. I look forward to more from this Author in the future. I recommend it to any science fiction lover.

Didn’t know this was a direct sequel to The Space Between Worlds, which I should have re-read before diving into this and also should have re-read just because it’s a great book.

Those Beyond the Wall didn’t hit me like the first book did. Maybe it’s because The Space Between Worlds came outta nowhere for me and knocked me out, and maybe it’s because I had super high expectations because of said knock out.

But man. I didn’t vibe with a whole lot here. I didn’t care for the characters, I found the flow and pacing irritating. The multiverse mystery plot was a cool concept but was completely underdeveloped. It felt so often like the author thinks the reader is brainless and we need our hands held to understand basic concepts. And like, I get it. Some of us *are* brainless! But that meant that the narrative didn’t flow naturally for me.

I couldn’t put The Space Between Worlds down. I had to remind myself to pick up Those Beyond the Wall.

This was magnificent. I could not put it down.

This story is told beautifully. When I say I couldn’t put this down, I’m not lying. I read during every free moment at work, I skipped the gym, I missed a hangout with friends, and then I stayed up most of the night to finish.

At first, I couldn’t put this down because I wanted to know more about the world. Then I couldn’t put it down because I needed to know everything about the main character, and the author does a great job of peeling back that information layer by layer so that you cannot help but keep turning pages. I needed to know who they were to themselves and to others. Then the plot swept me away.

This book is white-hot rage. But not self destructive rage, and not rage that incapacitates. This is rage that spurs you to action, that brings people together, that forces a better future because death would be better than the status quo.

The queer representation on this novel is stunning. Queerness is not a source of heartache or trauma; it is the source of unadulterated, affirming joy. It made my heart sing.

And the writing? It’s beautiful. This author is a shining star and I cannot wait to read more of her work.