The Infinite Lives of Maisie Day, by Christopher Edge

I'm still holding on to the middle grade sci fi/fantasy books of 2019, with a slightly over the top grim determination to read all the ones at hand before the end of January...(fortunately January 2020 is not a huge mg sci fi/fantasy release month, so I'm sure I can catch up on this year's in just a few days of reading!).

The Infinite Lives of Maisie Day, by Christopher Edge, is an English import that came out here in the US back in April 2019 (Delecorte), and in 2018 in the UK.  It's a story of sisters caught in an altered reality, with time and space gone wonky, with birthday balloons and tasty food meeting a horror of chaos and despair.

It's Maisie's tenth birthday, and her parents are making a huge effort to give her a great party.  The greatness of the party is supposed to make up for the fact that none of her friends are coming.  Maisie in fact has none at all.  She's a home-schooled science and math prodigy, who's never had a chance to socialize with other kids (me--not really convincing that her parents would have tried harder on this front, because clearly they care about her lots).

Maisie's jealous of her older sister, 15-year-old Lily, who isn't doing great at school but who has friends.  Lily, in turn, is jealous of Maisie, not just for being so incredibly brilliant, but also, a bit, for being protected by their parents.  Her "friends" aren't, in fact, all that great.

So anyway, here's Maisie getting reader for her party.  But then the narrative breaks.  And here's Maisie, alone in the house, with a black void outside, that starts creeping inside bit by bit.

Back and forth between normal birthday Maisie, happy on a sunny day, thinking about her life, and chaffing at it's limits, and learning things about Lily she hadn't realized before, and Maisie trapped by dark matter (?)  some other cosmic vortex of destruction and reality altering implosion (?), alone and scared.  She can't call her parents, but when she tries her sister, Lily picks up...and before the connection breaks off, Lily says she'll try to put things right.

But reality is collapsing around Maisie, and the darkness is pressing in....and in the other timeline, something shattering is about to happen as well....even finding out why and how this has happened doesn't help her get out of it.  Finally trapped Maisie has to do the unthinkable if she can get her life back to normal, and so she does.

And then comes a page of binary numbers that means nothing to me,  The reader (me) is left wondering, as the author intends,  what is "real."

Give this  to young readers who like their sci fi/fantasy claustrophobic and entrapping, with science (and bravery) the only way to make things come out right in the end....It's on the short end for mg fiction these days, which will add appeal for some readers; though there are plenty of twists, it's more novella than novel in feel.  No one could call this book over-blown (except perhaps with regard to Maisie's wonderfully unapologetic enthusiasm for figuring out the universe...)

In short, the twists are nicely twisted, and the lonely dark of the chaos world is beautifully balanced by the sunny birthday world.   And though Maisie is super smart, she's not insufferable, and though Lily is a teen aged jerk sister, she has more to her than that. Not one that particularly spoke to me (perhaps because of the particular way the twists twisted), but one I'm happy to recommend.

final note--the currency was Americanized for this edition, but the food and a few other things were not (a bit disconcerting!).  I wish publishers wouldn't Americanize at all!  I think that US kids today, exposed to life outside this country, can cope with more than they are being given credit for.  And in a book like this, where the stairs become an Escher-esque nightmare, spending pounds instead of dollars isn't all that odd.....