The sixth Dimensional Alliance book, closing the trilogy of the aunt’s journals. A tribute and a review.
Links to Infinity closes the second trilogy of The Dimensional Alliance, and with it the long arc of Lizzie’s journals. With only a week left in her convalescence, Jenny opens the last of her aunt’s journals. What she finds astonishes her. Lizzie’s adventures were beyond anything she’d imagined. The book is the payoff of the backstory Bonnie Dillabough had been unfolding across the middle volumes.
As Jenny reaches the end of the journals, she begins to understand her aunt, and by extension her own inheritance, far more deeply than before. That recognition is the part of the book that moved me most: the woman who left her a house and a key turns out to have been far more than Jenny ever guessed.
How does Links to Infinity complete the second movement?
There’s real structural satisfaction in how this ends. Bonnie spent three books letting Jenny read into Lizzie’s past. Links to Infinity brings that nested story to its climax just as Jenny’s recovery ends. The two timelines resolve together, the journals finished and the heroine ready to return to the larger fight. Bonnie ends the inner story and the framing situation at the same moment. That’s smart plotting, the kind plenty of seasoned novelists fumble. It rewards a reader who followed the whole arc, and it shows how thoroughly Bonnie had grown into the craft she took up so late.
In memory
A tribute to Bonnie Dillabough: the friend, mentor, and author behind The Dimensional Alliance, in her own story and mine.
Understanding the one who came before
The emotional core here, a younger woman finally understanding the older one who shaped her life, hits hard, and it’s pure Bonnie.
Her stories were never cynical; they were about connection across distance, generation, and even dimension. Jenny’s deepest understanding of her aunt comes through patient reading, page after page of another life. That feels like something Bonnie believed. We come to know one another through the stories we leave behind.
Keep reading
Writing a series: bringing a multi-book arc to a satisfying close: the structural payoff of resolving a nested story alongside its frame.
No author is an island
A book about a woman coming to know her aunt through the record she left behind sits especially close to one of Bonnie’s deepest convictions: that no author, and no person, is an island.
She lived that to the bone. She edited my Author Talk video series for free, bringing decades of broadcast experience and asking for no credit. She left warm, thoughtful comments in online communities even as her health declined.
She crocheted hats for the homeless and stayed active in her church and never stopped asking how she could help someone else. The Dimensional Alliance of her title is, after all, a community of allies across dimensions, and the warmth of these books toward connection, family, and mutual aid came straight from how she moved through the world.
It’s a fitting thought for a writer whose own stories now do exactly that work, letting readers come to know Bonnie through the books she left. Links to Infinity completes the middle of her saga; the final trilogy would carry Jenny back into the open. By the end of this volume the reader, like Jenny, has spent three books learning to understand someone through what they wrote. That’s now the only way any of us can come to know Bonnie too, and it still hurts. I’m grateful she left such a patient, generous record on the page.
