First of all, I have to talk about the fact that the author’s “Swedish consultant” came up with FINNA as a fake word used as the name of the novel and a plot-driving device therein, and nobody at any level of the book’s production noticed that is a common AAVE slang word. This book DID come out a few months before Nate Marshall’s book of the same name, but still…did nobody just….google the proposed title? I even went back and looked to see if maybe the author was not a USAmerican, i.e. not someone who would encounter AAVE. This might seem like a weird thing to harp on, but the point is that “finna” signaled to me a Black author, which is at least partially why I picked this up in the first place, and I went into it with expectations that were not at all borne out in the book itself.

Now that’s out of the way, um, this was fun and there were parts that were wildly imaginative, but you really just can’t fit that many universes into a novella. The best parts were when the main characters were just stuck at their shitty retail job and commenting on same. The heart of the book was the relationship between the two main characters, which was realistic and heartbreaking. I’m actually a little disappointed to see there’s a sequel; I liked the loose ends left at the end of this one.