Full disclosure: I do not remember requesting this ARC and was mildly bemused when I got the email saying I'd been approved because...I did not actually think The Space Between Worlds was all that great. I mean, it was fine, but I've said elsewhere that it mostly reminded me of Patton Oswalt's scorned magician hate-fucking the crowd with magic. "And than THIS twist happened, OKAY? Okay. And then ANOTHER twist! OKAY? Okay." for the whole book. It was exhausting.

It took me a while to settle into Those Beyond the Wall bc even with a different lead (and despite a banger of an author's note at the beginning), I really struggled. I sat at 6-8% for WEEKS. Would pick it up, read a paragraph, think "yeah, no" and put it down again.  Finally had to force myself to sit down and finish it, since the pub date is getting so close. 

AND I'M VERY GLAD I DID. Johnson talks in her author's note about how this book was fueled by the anger many of us were feeling during the protests in 2020 and that rage drips off of every page. Reading this was so cathartic in so many ways, and there are parts of it that I'm going to be thinking about for a very long time.