Gabriel Bergmoser is an award-winning Melbourne-based author and playwright. His YA novels include Boone Shepard and True Colour of a Little White Lie. Andromache Between Worlds is his first middle-grade book.
This is much more fantasy than science fiction as the technical aspects are somewhat vague, not that this matters a jot.
Our intrepid heroine Andromache, expelled from school, acquires a mysterious device, a locksmith, during a midnight visit to Precipice Laboratories with her science loving friend Rylee. To both their surprise, delight and a dash of horror, it can open portals to different universes where someone has links to Andromache’s DNA. Yes, it’s complicated.
Andromache is really upset with her mother and when she finds out that her father is not dead but disappeared twelve years ago, she sets out to explore these parallel universes in the hope of finding him.
What follow are Indiana Jones type adventures with giant crabs, dinosaurs, ancient Egypt, and futuristic worlds where Andromache confronts different versions of herself and her mother. Each encounter brings greater insight into her own fractured family relationships. Does her mother even want her let alone love her? Who and what was her father?
Andromache is helped by her two new friends Tobias, an orphan who works with the mysterious scientist Cavanaugh, and Rylee an unconventional free spirit.
Gabriel cleverly reveals Andromache’s turmoil as her perceptions and understandings enlarge.The pace and tension as well as the emotional stakes increase with each helter-skelter portal adventure. All the questions are satisfactorily answered in the ending with some jaw dropping revelations all round.
An enjoyable high stakes portal fantasy with a lot of heart aimed at readers aged 11+
Gabriel Bergmoser is an award-winning Melbourne-based author and playwright. His YA novels include Boone Shepard and True Colour of a Little White Lie. Andromache Between Worlds is his first middle-grade book.
