In 2019 I first picked up Sputnik’s Children as a Canada Reads longlisted book. With alternate Earth timeline/multiverses, an unreliable (and not super likable) MC, and a thrilling plotline, I devoured it. Sister’s Sputnik is a sequel, but also its own story. 

Once again following our reluctantly heroic, occasionally unlikable, unreliable narrator, Debbie Reynolds Biondi, as well as a new character, Unicorn Girl . Together, they travel the 2,052 multiverses as “The Sisters Sputnik” telling stories to eager listeners. In a world referred to as “Cozy Time”, they retell the story of an alternate timeline of a racist, backwards, Toronto filled with AI and their human acolytes, and how, when Debbie stole a print book from the library for research, she unwittingly unleashed a literally viral ideology espoused by the book. The book, which wistfully looks back on the 1950s as the epitome of Western life, transports anybody who comes into contact with it into a timeless shadow universe where the book is reality and people are sent back to *when* they came (that is, the time and place their ancestors first left their home) via a wormhole in a perverse inversion of the Statue of Liberty. And, as the super hero of her own life, it is up to Debbie, assisted by Unicorn Girl, to save the world as she knows it. 

Parts of this book are certainly dark. Post-pandemic, with long shadows of nationalism, suspicion of “outsiders”, and discrimination rampant, the book felt a little too realistic at times. Particularly the reflection by Unicorn Girl that society seems to be “moving backwards” through time (read only a day before the Roe V Wade ruling). But the premise and the story is engaging and ultimately hopeful. Full of time-travel and multiverses, the story starts tangled (Sinatra is dating the queen?!) and only by reading on do the assorted threads straighten out and start to match our own recollection of history. Once I got in and immersed fully in the story, I couldn’t put the book down.