The eighth Dimensional Alliance book, the last Bonnie finished, where Jenny becomes the Gatekeeper. A tribute and a review.
Tangles of Infinity is the eighth book in The Dimensional Alliance, and the last one Bonnie Dillabough published. Jenny, now the Gatekeeper, finds herself in charge of a team responsible for the safety of all the gateways spanning the multiverse, as she and her friends try to rid that multiverse of an ultimate, insatiable evil. It carries Bonnie’s signature mix: adventure, sciency stuff, a tiny bit of romance, and the struggle of good-hearted people against a tyranny larger than themselves.
Jenny’s arc across the series, from an ordinary woman who inherited a strange house to the Gatekeeper entrusted with the whole multiverse, reaches something like its full height here. The reluctant heroine of the early books now leads, and Bonnie got her there fairly, one book at a time, with no cheap leap from nobody to savior. That patience impresses me.
How does a series protagonist come into her own?
There’s a satisfying arc in Jenny’s rise to Gatekeeper, the title itself a fitting destination for a series that began with a single impossible door. The woman who once didn’t know what her aunt’s key would open now guards every gateway in the multiverse. That progression, from inheriting a mystery to safeguarding a cosmos, is the through-line Bonnie built across eight books. Plenty of long series lose the thread halfway. This one didn’t, and the payoff in this volume is the reward for anyone who followed the whole saga.
In memory
A tribute to Bonnie Dillabough: the friend, mentor, and author behind The Dimensional Alliance, in her own story and mine.
The last book she finished
It’s impossible to write about this book without addressing its place in Bonnie’s story. Tangles of Infinity is the final volume she completed and published. She was writing the ninth, Tapestry of Infinity, the intended close of her nine-book arc, right up until she passed in April 2025, and by every account she would have finished it had she been given the time.
The saga stops one book short of its planned ending, and I hate that it does. It’s a real loss, and it’s part of what these pages now hold: a nearly complete universe, built late in a life and left almost whole.
Keep reading
It’s never too late: the writing life Bonnie proved possible: eight published novels begun at sixty-three. The fuller story of how she did it.
What she left on the shelf
Bonnie believed that stories live on, and she was right in a way that this book makes plain. Her physical voice is silent now, but her words still speak, across these pages, in the readers still turning them, in the writers she mentored toward their own first books. She proved it’s never too late, not to dream, not to write, not to begin again, and she proved it not with a slogan but with eight finished novels and a ninth in progress.
I believe there are people, maybe decades from now, who will find these books and feel what those of us who knew her already know: that Bonnie Dillabough didn’t just write science fiction. She built worlds, she wrote from the heart, and she made ours better. Tangles of Infinity is where that work rests, complete enough to be a gift.
Bonnie said it best herself: the first book in this series was published two weeks before her sixty-fourth birthday, and it’s never too late, there are many more to come. There were eight, and very nearly nine. That’s a damn fine body of work at any age. Tangles of Infinity is where her published multiverse rests, and where Jenny, the Gatekeeper, stands watch over all the doors. I can’t think of a better image to leave her on.
