Time travel. Politics. Science fiction. Cultural conflict. Romance. Skipshock, the first title in a planned duology, is a gripping, mind-bending novel, layered in multiple genres, about a girl who accidentally slips through a portal and is now expected to save the world--"Or some of them."
Pale, redheaded, 16-year-old Margo is headed to a boarding school in Dublin, Ireland, for a "fresh start" after her father's death, when "a weird situation" occurs. Margo has inadvertently "bounced... undetected" through a portal into a different world--many of them, in fact. By doing so, she has become a crucially important weapon in the eyes of both sides of a burgeoning war. "If we can learn how you did it, we could do it, too," a local revolutionary tells her. Margo is drawn into the struggle, unwillingly at first, through the passion of her guide, Moon, a salesman between the realms. Moon, whose work is tightly regulated and requires rigorous licensing tests, is suffering the effects of skipshock, the condition that results from frequent travel between world time scales, giving the sense that "a whole handful of sand from your life's personal hourglass has been thrown out the window."
Caroline O'Donoghue (All Our Hidden Gifts) has built a remarkable and complex series of worlds in which two people from extravagantly different backgrounds collide. Alternating chapters represent Margo's voice (in third person) and Moon's (first person), pulling the reader along on a harrowing, heartbreaking, life-or-death campaign to bring balance back to the worlds. Breathtaking and relevant. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor