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Guarding the Gates between Parallel Worlds

 A review by Paula Chaffee Scardamalia

World-Walker by Melisa Michaels. Five Star. Hardcover. 360 pages. $25.95.

For active dreamers and those who have explored parallel lives and other worlds, Melissa Michaels’ fantasy novel, World-Walker, raises interesting possibilities and suggestions for further exploration and thought.

The author’s central character, Suli Grail, is a world-walker, someone who can travel between parallel worlds and time.  Her sworn duty is to uphold the integrity of the worlds and thus prevent another Age of Chaos, the result of unregulated travel between countless parallel worlds that weakened boundaries.

Parallel worlds result when an event on one world reaches a pivotal point.   But pivotal does not necessarily mean a catastrophe or war.  Pivotal is often an action by one person that shifts the direction of the future.  At that point, another world splits off and develops from the action of that person, while the previous world goes on as if nothing happened.  The result in World-Walker is multiple worlds with the same person, doppelgangers, in each of them.

While Central is busy sending out world-walkers to make sure the boundaries between worlds are maintained, one person, the Other as he is called by Central and Suli’s former lover, has stolen one of Suli’s gatestones and is bouncing from world to world.  While hopping from world to world, the Other discovers the music of the Gates, as well as his ability to travel without a gatestone – he is a Natural.  Suli is assigned the duty of catching him or killing him, while other factions are actually trying to save him because they believe that maintaining the boundaries is actually causing atrophy in the Universe. 

As travelers between worlds and times, dreamers will enjoy the practical and moral dilemmas and possibilities raised by this novel, as well as the story line.  Perhaps in our next travels, we will discover like Jesse Farrell (the Other’s name) that “…there’s more than one music maker in the world.  And more than one kind of power…”