Ava has organized her work schedule at Not!IKEA to avoid any contact with her ex, Jules, and she is therefore deeply resentful of being called in to sub on a day she was supposed to have off. Of course, she’s sharing a shift with Jules, and it’s awkward as fuck. To make matters worse, a customer’s grandmother goes missing in the depths of the store, and it becomes pretty obvious that she’s disappeared into a wormhole. As the two newest employees, Ava and Jules are tapped to go chasing through the multiverse together to find the missing woman.
My favorite thing about Finna is that Nino Cipri could have easily let the jokey premise be the book. It’s pretend-IKEA! There are wormholes! That’s an excellent premise, and I’d have been there for it. Cipri sends Ava and Jules through a fun, imaginative series of worlds, though I’d argue that the worldbuilding for the regular-world side of things is even stronger. When the wormhole opens up, the manager at Ava and Jules’s branch of Not!IKEA — it’s called LitenVärld — puts on a training video about wormholes, and everybody goofs on it and hopes they won’t have to be the one to do anything about it.
“Are we getting overtime for this?” someone else asked.
Ava glanced up long enough to see Tricia shake her head. “Not unless you remain in the other worlds past eighty hours in a single pay period. But! I do have a couple of Pasta and Friends gift cards for the brave volunteers.”
I loled at this bit. Cipri perfectly captures the combination of annoyance and resignation that goes along with working a job like this. You know it sucks. Not having it would suck more. You’re willing to work the fucking job, that part’s whatever; but you’re constantly teetering right on the brink of willingness to go along with management that insists on pretending a fair transaction of work for wages is taking place and everything’s fun and fine. I loved that nobody’s unduly surprised about the sudden existence of wormholes at their shitty retail job. Ava and Jules and all the other employees are just like, yeah, well, this fuckin figures.
All to reiterate: I’d have been here for this book if it had just been its premise! But Cipri uses the short space of a novella beautifully to develop their characters. You’re in on the premise because it’s funny, but you’re in on the characters because they’re sad. Ava’s truly grieving the loss of her relationship, and the things that challenged her and Jules as a couple come back to challenge them again as a wormhole retrieval team. Cipri does a beautiful job of getting the reader in on Ava and Jules as a team without exactly suggesting that they would work as a couple. Neither is it suggested that they can or should work as a couple; Cipri’s thesis about them is that they could be something, given enough time to figure it out. It’s a lovely, hopeful way of thinking about relationships. Ava and Jules’s negotiation of who they are, who they’ve been to each other, and who they might be to each other in the future provides a marvelous emotional underpinning to this extremely fun, queer SF adventure.
Note: I received an e-ARC of Finna from the publisher for review consideration. This has not affected the contents of my review.