The seventh Dimensional Alliance book, where love and a widening threat raise the stakes. A tribute and a review.
By Threads of Infinity, the seventh book in The Dimensional Alliance, Jenny is back in the thick of the fight, and Bonnie Dillabough adds a thread she had been weaving all along: the heart. Jenny and Burt are madly in love but, as agents of the Alliance, almost never get to see one another, and that ache runs underneath an adventure that’s grown to threaten even Earth.
The Alliance is working to free the enslaved dimensions from the grip of the evil Inseni, dimensional pirates whose reach now extends toward Jenny’s own world. The question driving the book is the one the whole series has been building toward: how can Jenny and her friends save them all?
Romance amid the rescue
The choice to foreground Jenny and Burt’s separated love is a telling one. Bonnie described her books as having adventure, sciency stuff, and a tiny bit of romance, and that proportion is exactly right, the love story is a thread, not the fabric, present enough to give the stakes a human warmth without overwhelming the adventure. Lovers kept apart by duty is an old and reliable engine of feeling, and Bonnie uses it to remind the reader what Jenny is fighting for: not abstractions, but the people and the connection she cares about.
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 widening threat in Threads of Infinity?
This late in the series, the stakes have expanded from a single inherited mystery to the fate of enslaved dimensions and the safety of Earth itself, the natural escalation of a saga approaching its climax. Bonnie keeps the tone hopeful even as the danger grows, holding to her conviction that flawed, good-hearted people working together can meet a threat larger than any of them. The Alliance itself, a community of allies across dimensions, embodies the belief in connection that ran through all her work.
Keep reading
Writing a heroine readers root for across a whole series: the warmth and resolve that carry Jenny through seven books and counting.
Grit, heart, and an internet connection
By the seventh book the shelf itself is an accomplishment. Bonnie didn’t start with a roadmap or a publishing contract or an MFA; she started, as she put it, with grit, heart, and an internet connection. Seven full novels into a series begun at sixty-three, while managing health challenges with a humor that made you forget she was dealing with them, she was writing with complete command of a universe grown from a teenage dream.
There’s a quiet defiance in that productivity, a refusal to accept that the time for big creative work had passed. Jenny fighting through separation and danger to protect the people she loves has a counterpart in the author fighting through every practical reason not to write and doing it anyway, book after book. Seven books in, Bonnie was writing with full command of a universe she’d built from that dream. The penultimate published volume, Threads of Infinity sets the pieces for the saga’s intended close.
That she kept the warmth and the hope intact this deep into a long series, never letting the darkness of the Inseni overwhelm the light she wrote by, is its own kind of achievement, and its own kind of message from the woman who wrote it, a quiet insistence that hope is a choice a storyteller gets to make, and one Bonnie made on every page she wrote.
