Having read and loved Caroline O’Donoghue’s novel The Rachel Incident (which you can also hear me going on about on my podcast), I decided to give her fantasy novel a go. Skipshock is categorized as YA fantasy, but apart from the two main characters being in their late teens, there’s nothing that for me really distinguished it from fantasy written for adult readers: the worldbuilding is as complex and the stakes as high as in any adult fantasy.

Skipshock is a world-crossing fantasy novel (fantasy, but with what I’d consider some sci-fi elements also) in which Margo, a young Irish girl on a train on her way to boarding school suddenly gets jolted into a parallel world in which she is also riding on a train and meets Moon, a young travelling salesman. Moon lives in a universe of interconnected worlds where some people are able to travel from world to world, but the means of travel is strictly controlled by those in the richer and more comfortable worlds. Margot falls in with a group of freedom fighters who are trying to win back the right to travel freely between worlds and believe that her ability to cross from a previously unknown world might offer a key to opening the routes between worlds once again.

This was an engrossing novel in which, as I got near the end, I started to get that uneasy feeling that there was no way the story could be wrapped up in the remaining pages. And sure enough, it turns out Skipshock, just recently released, is “the first in a planned duology” so I will have to wait a year or more to find out what happens to Margo and Moon. But I think it will be worth the wait.