The wounds from their breakup aren’t just still raw, they’re still bleeding.Īnd then a customer’s grandmother gets lost in a wormhole. And that’s before Ava’s day descends into the worst of all possible worlds. While it seems like Ava is making the best of this ultimately dead end job, her descriptions of work life and working conditions in this minimum wage corporate box let the reader feel just how soul-killing the place is. Next time I’m in Ikea I’m going to be looking for all of them and trying to make up more!) (Seriously, the names that Ava has come up with for the various stage-set arrangements are pure gold, hilarious, mocking and much too true all at the same time. Like Edgelord Rockabilly Dorm Room, Pastel Goth Hideaway and Nihilist Bachelor Cube. Inside one of the faux-apartment layouts at Ikea – the ones you wouldn’t want to live in even in extremis. And that seems like the place where the idea behind Finna was born. It doesn’t seem all that far-fetched to believe that those features which make it so easy to get lost inside the store would also make it much too easy for one store to bleed into another that is almost-but-not-quite the same.Īt that point, a wormhole between the multiverse of oh-so-similar stores doesn’t seem all that far out of the realms of possibility.

There’s something simultaneously comforting and horrifying about the maze-like sameness of Ikea stores, or in this case, their lookalike LitenVärld ™ stores. As in “you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” I’ve always believed that Ikea stores and shopping mall parking lots were designed on the “Hotel California” principle. Can friendship blossom from the ashes of their relationship? In infinite dimensions, all things are possible. To find the missing granny, Ava and Jules will brave carnivorous furniture, swarms of identical furniture spokespeople, and the deep resentment simmering between them. Multi-dimensional swashbuckling would be hard enough, but those two unfortunate souls broke up a week ago. When an elderly customer at a Swedish big box furniture store - but not that one - slips through a portal to another dimension, it's up to two minimum-wage employees to track her across the multiverse and protect their company's bottom line. It explores queer relationships and queer feelings, capitalism and accountability, labor and love, all with a bouncing sense of humor and a commitment to the strange.

Nino Cipri's Finna is a rambunctious, touching story that blends all the horrors the multiverse has to offer with the everyday awfulness of low-wage work. Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Published by Tor.com on February 25, 2020 Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley

Finna by Nino Cipri