Cristin Bishara. Relativity. New York: Macmillan, 2013. Print.

Relativity is sci-fi, young adult, and almost chick lit. It is clever. Its main character, Ruby Wright, is a high school freshman whose widowed father is getting married, so the two of them are leaving the exciting left coast of San Francisco for rural Ohio. She is leaving her sort-of boyfriend behind and having to endure a wicked stepsister straight out of Cinderella.

As in Cinderella, magic happens. But the events are couched in pseudo-scientific terms so the story is more like science fiction. The science is actually fun to speculate about as current superstring and membrane theory (a.k.a. strings and branes) speculates on parallel universes. Instead of a Narnian wardrobe, Ruby finds a door in an old tree that takes her to parallel universes.

Bishara alludes to A Christmas Carol, and in a sense Relativity is similar. Ruby sees herself in parallel universes like Scrooge sees himself in a possible present and future. In one universe she is president of the high school French club rather than a physics fanatic. (The real Ruby has a topological space-time formula tattoo). There her mother is still alive, but her parents are divorcing. In another the stepsister is already married with a baby. In one her father weighs about fifty pounds more than her real father does. Much of the story, told in the first person, is like the Ghost of Christmas Past. How will Ruby handle the present and the future?

Starting with the wanderings of Ulysses, we could name many other stories with imaginary or alternate worlds. Swift, Dickens, Carroll, Verne, Wells, Heinlein, Lewis all do this in some way. Bishara’s contribution is that she focuses more on the people than on the magic land. In that sense she is more like Dickens or Lewis.

There is a lot of conflict, but Ruby begins to realize that every alternate universe has its challenges. Would she want her mother alive? Of course! That land is hard to leave. But would her parents getting a divorce be ultimately any easier to handle than her real mother’s death in a car accident? She learns things about herself and secrets about others.

Some things in Relativity are clever. In one universe America is still undiscovered by Europeans, so Ruby is a primitive and nomadic Native American. In one universe Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee is the hero of the American Revolution and the country’s first president. In each universe her father pursues a different occupation resulting in a different family dynamic.

The story is paced well, and Ruby encounters a lot of conflict. The basic plot could be called a fish out of water tale, but since Ruby has had some kind of life in each universe, it is more like a fish in a different fish bowl. On the perceptual and emotional level, it reminded me more of the time traveler in The Time Traveler’s Wife—only Ruby gets to keep her clothes and backpack.

At the end I was reminded of that saying attributed to Socrates:

If all misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart.

Or as Hamlet put it:

And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of. (3.1.81,82)