A Thousand Pieces of You introduced us to the multiverse–and sent us on adventure across the worlds in a desperate gamble for revenge… Or perhaps to save a life. Or perhaps even to fall in love.

The multiverse is infinite. So, yeah, we go through some terrible things together, and I’ve seen versions of you who are darker, and damaged, and I don’t care. I want you even when you’re broken. I want you no matter what. Your darkness, your anger, whatever it is you fear inside yourself—it doesn’t matter. I love you completely, don’t you see? I even want the worst of you because it’s still a part of you.

Ten Thousand Skies Above You takes that idea and expands upon it in a fascinating way. Now, it’s not just searching through the multiverse, it’s the early stages of a war between realities. Once again, it’s about saving a life, but this time, it’s less a puzzle and more a scavenger hunt, with some serious repercussions if you don’t find all of the pieces.

Other than a cliffhanger ending (we’ll come back to that…), it’s really quite a good sequel. If anything, I think I enjoyed it even more than the first.

On the plus side, I enjoyed stepping back into this world. Now we know what’s going on–even if we of course have to have a few new twists to keep us interested–and we can really get into exploring what it means to find ‘another you’. No matter how different the world, are these choices you still could have made? We get a touch of the good and an awful lot of the bad and the ugly that comes from this and I find it fascinating.

I particularly enjoyed seeing all the additional Theos and Pauls across the multiverse and how they interacted with Marguerite and with each other. “We’ll be together across all the worlds” is… weird to me. You may be a (near) perfect match, but in some worlds, you may never meet. What then? Do they not deserve their own happy ending?

On another plus, I really enjoyed the new worlds (even if they tended rather more depressing than the first book). We have the San Francisco of a world at war, the Russian Mafia of New York, and a full on cyberpunk future world. I do enjoy seeing all the variations among the world and the characters, I think that these books do this rather well.

Traveling through the worlds gives you perspective. It makes you value what you have.

I think my biggest problem was the ending. Oh why oh why do middle books so often have to end on a cliff hanger like that. The only saving grace is that the third is out already…

Onward!