The third Dimensional Alliance book, where choice becomes the heart of the story. A tribute and a review.
Mirrors of Infinity, the third book in The Dimensional Alliance, turns on a single idea that clearly mattered to Bonnie Dillabough: choice. As the synopsis puts it, in all things, choice was the key factor, and no one could choose for Jenny. For a series built on a reluctant heroine carrying the fate of a multiverse, that insistence on the irreducibility of personal choice is the moral center, and this volume puts it front and center.
Jenny remains the key to victory, but the book is less about the mechanics of the conflict than about the trials she must face and the decisions only she can make. Bonnie frames the stakes as a series of choices Jenny has to make instead of a problem she has to solve, a humane way to build a fantasy adventure.
Why is choice at the heart of Mirrors of Infinity?
There’s something of Bonnie’s own worldview in this. She believed in flawed but good-hearted people rising to meet a destiny they didn’t expect, and a story that locates its drama in choice instead of in raw power is a story that trusts its characters to be moral agents. Jenny is the key because of what she chooses, and that emphasis reflects the optimism and faith in people that ran through everything Bonnie wrote and, by every account, everything she did.
In memory
A tribute to Bonnie Dillabough: the friend, mentor, and author behind The Dimensional Alliance, in her own story and mine.
The midpoint of the first arc
As the third volume, Mirrors of Infinity sits at the heart of the series’ opening movement, deepening Jenny’s trials before the second trilogy turns to her aunt Lizzie’s story. It’s the kind of middle book that consolidates a series’ themes, and the theme it consolidates, that choice is the deciding factor in all things, is one worth a reader carrying beyond the page. Bonnie’s stories were grounded in light, and the light here is the dignity of a character who must choose for herself.
Keep reading
Hopeful fiction: stories that choose light without losing tension: the sincere, optimistic sensibility that defined Bonnie’s multiverse.
Written to make people smile
Bonnie had a phrase for what she did: pretending on paper.
She didn’t have to grow up, she said; she got to write all these crazy stories and make people smile. That spirit is everywhere in a book like this one, which treats a heroine’s moral trials with real weight while never losing the underlying joy of invention. The best compliment she ever received, she once told me, was a reader saying they could feel her in every paragraph, and it was exactly right.
A book centered on choice, written by someone who chose, at sixty-three, to finally tell her story, carries that presence. She was in every page. Her readers felt it. People approached her in grocery stores to ask when the next book was coming. She got her books into libraries and ran events at Barnes & Noble. For Bonnie the reward was never fame; it was someone walking up and asking for the next one.
Mirrors of Infinity is one of the books that brought her those questions, and reading it now, with its quiet insistence that we each must choose for ourselves, is a way of hearing that voice again, the warm, unhurried, deeply human voice her readers came to love and now have to find on the page instead of in person.
