Finna by Nino Cipri

I received a free copy from Netgalley with the option of giving an honest review. All my opinions are my own.

With Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix coming out a couple of years ago, Finna isn’t the first speculative fiction stab at Ikea. However, in many ways, it might be more original. The story tells of Ava and Jules, formerly romantically linked, but now working hard to avoid each other. When a wormhole opens up in their store and a grandmother gets lost, the undynamic duo are sent to rescue her. This sends them on a voyage of discovery about not only alternate dimensions, but themselves. Here’s my thoughts on the story:

• Ava and Jules are without a doubt the stars of the show, Ava’s stuck in a rut, working in a dead-end job and struggling to come to terms with breaking up with Jules. It doesn’t help that she lives in constant fear of making a mistake, which makes it hard for her to break out of her current malaise. Jules is the opposite. A transgender immigrant from Trinidad, Jules storms head first ino everything without a mioment’s hesitation, which seems to be the main reason for their breakup. The only thing that seems to even mildly upset Jules is when their boss, Tricia, refers to them as “he” or”him.” As for the other characters, the search for the grandmother turns out to be quite surprising. The wooden nature of the corporate lackey employees compared to the colourful leads would annoy us in any other book, but I doubt there are few of us who didn’t read this book thinking “oh yeah, I remember that boss”
• The alternate universes, as different forms of LitenVarld (their place of work), are weird and wonderful, and wildly different to what our heroes are used to. Amusingly though, no matter what world they travel to, the names of the room designs are the same. The worlds vary from one of carnivorous plants to an underwater world with massive submarines and pirates. There’s even an intradimensional subplot to add a little flavour to their search for the missing granny. If I had one gripe (and I always do), the fact that the book is short (a lightweight 144 pages), means these worlds are more touched upon than given any great detail. There’s a lot of humour peppered throughout, from the banter between Ava and Jules, their criticism of their employer and how they blunder the alternate worlds. What really made me laugh was the fact that the company actually had a procedural video for what to do when someone gets lost in a wormhole in their store.

Verdict

A fun character-driven genre-defying coming-of-age tale.