book review: The Last Hour Between Worlds

THE LAST HOUR BETWEEN WORLDS by Melissa Caruso* is my new favorite book. It’s gorgeous. It’s genius. It’s the book I needed eight years ago when I was grappling with the reality of being a new mother and desperate to see my experiences reflected somewhere–anywhere.

I loved it so much that you’re getting a (spoiler-free) book review from me for the first time ever!

Reality in this story has echoes. Solid reality is called Prime and there are eleven layers of changeable Echoes that get more bizarre and hostile the farther down you go. Sometimes things like people and pets fall through the layers on accident or on the scheming of creatures from the Echoes, also called Echoes.

Kembral Thorne (and how freaking awesome is that name) is a Hound. It’s her job to retrieve people and things that have fallen into Echoes. She’s been as deep as the sixth Echo. Once. To retrieve a dog. The farthest anyone else alive has gone is five.

But for right now, Kem is on leave as a single mother to a two-month-old, and for tonight, she’s out sans baby at this world’s equivalent of a New Year’s party.

And of course, everything goes all to hell. Murder, mayhem, and Kem has to figure out how to save everyone and get them back to Prime as the whole house with the party gets pulled into the Echoes.

The opening pages of this book are absolutely genius. We get a description of the Echoes and how people can fall into them (which reminded me so strongly of my flash story The Wander Problem that I instantly loved the book on principal), and the difficulty rescued folks have adjusting back to Prime. Then Kem, as the narrator, likens that feeling to her cognitive dissonance of her old life clashing with her current new-mother-to-and-infant-who-never-sleeps self, surrounded by people she hasn’t seen since before giving birth.

What makes this so great is that the description of those returned to Prime is clear enough that I felt I understood even before the comparison. For a reader who hasn’t been in the trenches of new parenthood, it is an excellent comparison to understand the feelings overwhelming Kem in the moment. As a reader who’s been there and done that, the empathy was instant, intense, and VISCERAL.

I felt seen in a way I ached to find (and never did) in the early years of parenting.

That alone would have been enough to carry me past the fact that this is a time loop story, as the party keeps resetting in the Echoes. I can’t stand most time loop stories. I hate the whole way everything resets and all the choices and consequences get erased, which also leaks so much of the tension. I’ve sometimes wanted to write a time loop story just to have one I didn’t hate, but now I don’t have to. I won’t say more on that for fear of spoilers–just know that this is a time loop story for people who despise time loop stories.

Throw in sword fights, magic, a thief rival, and a little sapphic romantic tension, and you get THE LAST HOUR BETWEEN WORLDS. I absolutely recommend it!

(Its recently released sequel THE LAST SOUL AMONG WOLVES* is a fantastic continuation. Rather than a time loop, it’s an Agatha Christie-esque isolated island murder mystery. My only disappointment was that the baby feels more like a prop than a character in most of the scenes she’s in, though it’s hard to give a baby that young agency in a story, and even harder when she has so little page time.)

*Bookshop.org affiliate links, which means I get a small commission if you buy the books through the links in this post.