Opposite World by Elizabeth Ann Martins

Book Review

Elloise Hopkins

Her mother and father were both there when Piper Screed had that seizure. After that, when she was awake again, they left Seattle and city life behind, moving an hour away to the isolated woods of Snoqualmie Pass. Her mother was no longer there, and the memory of those final moments is lost to Pip. Her father tells her they were both sick, and only Pip survived. As she grew up, Pip could not remember everything, so she clung onto the things she could.

Lonely, frustrated and lacking the answers that her father, Dr. Richard Screed, coding genius, cannot or will not give her, Pip finds comfort in Farley, her only friend in this remote life. Cut off from technology and society, Farley and his aunt offer Pip company and a life that she does not have with her father alone. At 21 they marry, and in a last, desperate attempt to take a life for herself, Pip, with the help of her aunt, takes a job at Nyxyn, and finds herself pulled towards The Reverie Cloud – the programme that ended her father’s career, and possibly his sanity.

Despite her father’s warnings – dire warnings of the dangers of the world he left behind, and those who are searching for him – Pip cannot resist the opportunity to find the missing parts of her past, at long last. For it seems The Reverie Cloud, designed to help people face trauma and heal, can grant just what she is looking for. A trip into her own mind and a chance to find out what really happened to her mother. Pip does not yet realise the journey will be more dangerous and more damaging than she has imagined.

Opposite World is part science fiction, part psychological horror, and has a fantastic premise – The Reverie Cloud grants a dream state where the user has the option to control elements of their dreams, from meditation and relaxation, to having a fantastical adventure on a quest, to facing past memories and confronting the actions of themselves and others in those moments, and the moments they shaped.

Pip’s experiences, and her father’s seemingly irrational shunning of society and technology, have her questioning everything that she once believed. The story tracks Pip’s life as her ‘old’ reality and her ‘new’ reality merge and converge, leaving her to doubt and distrust everything.  

Pip becomes her own unreliable narrator and navigator as the story progresses. The worldbuilding and the way the technical details are explained throughout the story is superb, and the characterisation is strong throughout. In particular, Pip encounters some expertly written antagonists who inject additional menace and uncertainty, as well as frequent stumbling blocks, into her path.

This is a story of trust, and a brilliant, unique journey into the vulnerabilities and insecurities of the self.