The fourth Dimensional Alliance book, where the series turns to tell the aunt’s story. A tribute and a review.
With Ripples of Infinity, the fourth book in The Dimensional Alliance, Bonnie Dillabough does something a confident series writer does: she turns the camera. After three books with Jenny at the center, this volume finally tells Lizzie’s story, the aunt whose house, cat, and mysterious key set the whole series in motion. It’s the pivot from the first trilogy into the second, and it deepens the world by reaching into its past.
Jenny had been curious about her aunt from the moment she inherited the house on Infinity Loop, and so, surely, had the reader. Now, with a few weeks of respite from the intense conflict between the Alliance and its enemies, the series opens Lizzie’s history, and the woman who was a mystery in the first three books becomes a character in her own right.
Turning to the origin
Structurally this is a smart move, the kind that rewards a reader’s patience. By withholding Lizzie’s story for three books and then giving it as the fourth, Bonnie lets the mystery of the aunt build before paying it off, and she refreshes a series that might otherwise have simply continued forward by instead reaching backward into how it all began. A series that can deepen instead of merely extend is a series with somewhere to go, and the turn to Lizzie shows Bonnie thinking like a saga-builder.
In memory
A tribute to Bonnie Dillabough: the friend, mentor, and author behind The Dimensional Alliance, in her own story and mine.
What is the frame within the frame in Ripples of Infinity?
This volume also introduces the device that shapes the second trilogy: Jenny reading her aunt’s journals during her convalescence, a story nested inside the larger one. It’s a graceful way to braid past and present, and it lets Bonnie tell two timelines at once, Jenny’s recovery and Lizzie’s adventures, each illuminating the other. For a writer four books into her first-ever series, that structural ambition is no small thing.
Keep reading
Writing a series: how to deepen a world instead of just extending it: the turn to a backstory character that refreshes a saga at its midpoint.
No cookie-cutter mold
That a writer four books into her first-ever series would confidently restructure it around a new viewpoint character says something about how fully Bonnie had claimed her authorship. She liked to say you don’t have to fit a certain cookie-cutter mold to be a successful published author, and she was living proof, a woman who raised six children, built a decades-long career in digital marketing and broadcast television, and only then sat down to write the novels that had been waiting in her since she was a teenager.
The unconventional path showed up as confidence on the page; she wasn’t following anyone’s template for how a series should go, so she felt free to turn it toward Lizzie’s story when the story called for it. Every book Bonnie added to this universe was a book she nearly didn’t write at all, having come to novels so late. Ripples of Infinity is the sound of a writer who had found her stride and was using it to build something with real architecture.
The turn to Lizzie is also, in hindsight, a gift to the reader who would later lose Bonnie: a reminder built into the series itself that the people who come before us leave more behind than we first realize, and that an inheritance can be a story as easily as a house or a key.
