Opposite World - Elizabeth Anne Martins
- Kindig
- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
OPPOSITE WORLD
ELIZABETH ANNE MARTINS
**
Memories are malleable, dreams are a battlefield, and reality is a shifting landscape. Think Inception meets Dark Matter, with echoes of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the unsettling corporate dystopia of Severance.
Piper “Pip” Screed remembers nothing about her mother’s mysterious death or the strange episode that left her in a deep, unexplained sleep. All she knows is that her father uprooted them to a secluded mountain cabin, severed all ties to the outside world, and refuses to answer her questions.
Fifteen years later, Pip escapes isolation and discovers The Reverie Cloud—a revolutionary sleep-therapy program that merges the subconscious with virtual reality. Here, users can experience their desires, confront fears, and rewrite their pasts in a dreamscape indistinguishable from reality. But when The Reverie Cloud falls into the hands of those who see her subconscious as a prize, Pip becomes ensnared within its unstable architecture. Now locked inside the program, she must navigate its mercurial layers, face the horrors buried within her subconscious, and unravel the truth about her past before time runs out. Worse, she’s not the only one at risk—her father’s life hangs in the balance, too.
But the deeper Pip ventures, the more dangerous the game becomes. If she pushes too far, she may never escape. Yet only by confronting the truth can she hope to uncover what really happened to her mother—before the program consumes her entirely.
Blending science fiction with psychological horror, surreal fantasy, and an aching tremor of human longing, OPPOSITE WORLD is an exploration of memory, identity, and the thin divide between perception and reality.
MY REVIEW
**
With a blurb containing comparisons to Inception, Dark Matter, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Minds and Severance, I was really excited to start reading Opposite World.
Pip has been introduced to The Reverie Cloud, a service which shapes your dreaming experience, allowing you to take control – going on epic quests or reliving a moment from your own memories. But as dream and reality start to blur, Pip learns that her memories and experiences may not be as objective as she believes…
Opposite World, by all accounts should have been one of my standout books of the year - it’s standalone sci-fi, there’s a shady corporation, an unreliable narrator and it focuses on topics of dreams and technology - all the things I love in a book. However, there was something about the writing of this that stopped me from engaging in it fully. Although the beginning of the book, Pip’s childhood and the mystery of her missing mother pulled me in, the middle portion of the book started feeling very repetitive, with Pip slipping into paranoia and having endless sessions at the Reverie Cloud. I didn’t feel enough empathy with her to care about what was happening to her, and her thoughts were so jumbled and confused it was hard to work out what was happening. This is of course, by design when it comes to the next section, but I think it dragged the pace and confused the action a little too much without the payoff.
The later part of the book – where we are fully in the dream world then suddenly felt a bit like a fever dream. As a reader I was grasping at concepts and trying to work out what was real and what had happened, but not in a satisfying way. Characters became caricatures of themselves, and we were told about events that hadn’t even been hinted at before. I also struggled with the idea of altering memories to leave hints, as this affects the timeline in ways that weren’t really explored here.
After the main storyline is wrapped up, there are then several epilogue chapters which are years afterwards, with some vague foreshadowing. I found myself not really caring about this – I think it would have been better to condense these and just have one satisfying epilogue rather than trying to shoehorn in characters I had honestly forgotten existed or talking about trick or treating.
Overall, Opposite World was a bit of a mess for me – great concept but the pace dragged in the middle, and I struggled to empathise or really know what was going on for the rest of it. Thank you to NetGalley & Flame Tree Press for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
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