The fifth Dimensional Alliance book, deep in the aunt’s journals and the passing of a torch. A tribute and a review.
Chords of Infinity, the fifth book in The Dimensional Alliance, continues the device Bonnie Dillabough introduced in the previous volume: as Jenny recuperates from her last battle with the Groga, she keeps reading the journals of her aunt Lizzie Japhet, the woman from whom she inherited the little house on Infinity Loop and all its secrets. The result is a book that moves between two lives, Jenny’s present recovery and Lizzie’s remembered adventures.
Within the journals, Jenny discovers the whirlwind story of her aunt as a young woman, a college student stepping into the same kind of wonder that would one day pass to Jenny herself. The book braids the generations together, letting the reader watch the multiverse through two pairs of eyes a lifetime apart.
How do the two timelines work in Chords of Infinity?
The journal structure does graceful work here. By framing Lizzie’s adventures as something Jenny reads while healing, Bonnie ties the action of the past directly to the emotional life of the present, so that Lizzie’s story becomes an inheritance Jenny is actively receiving. It’s a warm, human way to handle a multi-generational saga, and it reflects something Bonnie valued deeply: the passing of a torch from one person to the next, the older guiding the younger without ever choosing for them.
In memory
A tribute to Bonnie Dillabough: the friend, mentor, and author behind The Dimensional Alliance, in her own story and mine.
The torch and the teller
It’s hard not to see Bonnie in that theme.
She spent her later years mentoring younger writers, breaking down the publishing process for the overwhelmed, passing her hard-won knowledge along without gatekeeping. A series whose middle books are built around a young woman learning from the journals of the aunt who came before her is, in a sense, a series about exactly what Bonnie did with her own time: hand the torch forward. The form and the life rhyme.
Keep reading
World-building across time: making a multiverse feel lived-in: the multi-generational scope that gives Bonnie’s universe its depth.
The mentor in the margins
The torch-passing at the heart of this book wasn’t just a theme for Bonnie; it was how she lived.
She mentored aspiring authors for no money and no recognition, because she remembered being lost in the maze of publishing and afraid to ask for help. She broke the self-publishing process down for people it overwhelmed, gave straight answers wrapped in kindness, and refused to gatekeep creativity. She believed even editors need editors, even authors need help, that we have each other for a reason.
A novel built around a younger woman receiving the hard-won knowledge of the woman before her is, read against Bonnie’s life, almost a self-portrait of her generosity. She was always the one handing the journals forward.
This is one of the volumes Bonnie wrote in the steady stretch of her late-blooming career, building her nine-book arc one book at a time. The reading note: the series rewards being taken in order, and Chords of Infinity sits at the heart of the second trilogy, deep in Lizzie’s story. Read in sequence, it’s where the two-generation structure pays its fullest dividends, the past and present finally close enough to touch, two women’s lives rhyming across the years that separate them, each discovering the same wonder in her own turn.
