Discussing the big twists of Andromache Between Worlds

WARNING: Contains giant spoilers for Andromache Between Worlds

When it came to writing this blog (similar to one I did for Caretaker last year), I realised that despite being ostensibly a kid’s book, Andromache Between Worlds packs in a lot to discuss. In writing about The Caretaker’s spoilers, it was fairly easy to just move through the main points, but Andromache’s secrets are a little more layered, not least in how they connect strongly to a previous work of mine.
 
So to tackle the big moments, reveals and themes of Andromache Between Worlds, I’m going to break this down into several sections. Starting with the spoiler that, depending on how far back you read my work, will be either the book’s biggest talking point or totally irrelevant. And that, of course, is:
 
The Boone Shepard Connection
 
I’ve never exactly hidden this, but here I can properly delve into the fact that Andromache Between Worlds is, to a not insignificant degree, a sequel to the Boone Shepard Trilogy. By which I mean the main character, Andromache Peters, is the daughter of Boone Shepard, who is of course the long-lost father she spends the book trying to track down.
 
If you don’t know the Boone books then you might be reading this thinking ‘hang on, when the hell was that mentioned?’ Which was kind of the point. Early in the writing process, Boone Shepard and Promethia Peters being the famous parents Andromache has grown up in the shadow of was explicit, but it was decided that linking this book so directly to the old ones could be dangerous, in that it might create the impression that you have to have read the Boone series to read this one.
 
While much of what happened in the Boone books is either directly referenced or has a huge bearing on what happens in Andromache, her parents are never once named, only ever referred to as Mum and Dad. This was to ensure that anyone unfamiliar with the other books wouldn’t be tripped up thinking they’d accidently come in halfway through an ongoing story, while those who do know the Boone books will pick up on the ample references.
 
But even though I used the term before, I don’t think of Andromache as a sequel. Technically it is; the events of this book can’t happen without those of the previous ones, but it’s not a Boone Shepard novel – it’s an Andromache Peters one. It had to be its own thing, never reliant on the tone or events or minutiae of the Boone series.
 
If I’m being honest, early on a lot of the appeal in this book was a chance to return to the Booniverse. I’ve written before about how much those characters and stories meant to me and how sad it was to say goodbye at the end of The Silhouette and the Sacrifice. Revisiting Boone and Promethia and Oscar and Vincent (we’ll get to him) but through the eyes of other characters felt like a great way to see old friends again without undoing the way I concluded their story.
 
Andromache’s earliest genesis was back when I was writing the Boone books. The concept, that years later Boone would be trapped in a parallel universe and his daughter would have to find him, was fully formed as early as 2014. There was never a version of this book that wasn’t connected to Boone, but there were versions that were far more reliant on him.
 
But as I got to know the new characters, they became increasingly dominant, giving this book a style and voice and intention all its own. I wouldn’t call Andromache a ‘torch-passing’ story because I don’t think that’s what happens here. If there is a torch, then Andromache did not need to be given it – she picked it up and ran with it all by herself.
 
Which feels like a good place to talk about:
 
The Central Trio
 
Early on I knew that Andromache would need sidekicks, but didn’t have a clear picture of who they would be. That picture only really emerged as I started to write, and once I found my central trio I fell as in love with them as I have any character I’ve written.
 
I’ll start with Andromache herself. At times, I’ve worried that she might be a somewhat boring protagonist. Her closest comparison among my ‘heroes’, fittingly enough, is Boone Shepard but while they’re both relatively straightforward good guys, Boone has a haplessness and exasperation and depth of pain that Andromache doesn’t. By contrast, I worried that she was a little too good, a little too much of a hero without enough moral ambiguity or quirks.
 
It wasn’t until I listened to the audiobook, read by Ayesha Gibson, that I fully understood how much I like Andromache. And it’s precisely because of the things I worried might be weaknesses in how she was written. Andromache starts the book as a lonely, isolated, unintentional trouble-magnet. She can get nothing right. She can’t make friends. She resents and idolises her parents at the same time. She starts her adventures more or less by mistake and in the first half of the book spends more time running away and fretting than doing much of any worth.
 
But just past the halfway point, when she’s confronted with a seemingly perfect alternate version of herself who is in truth anything but, Andromache comes into her own. Meeting Lady Black terrifies Andromache because it seems to indicate that had things gone differently, she could easily have become a villain. But it’s also this meeting that forces her to step up and decide exactly who she wants to be. Andromache overturns Lady Black’s tyranny through her own ingenuity and it’s this quick-thinking cleverness that propels her through the rest of the book and ultimately saves her father.
 
Andromache is insecure and a little self-involved. She’s also an unambiguous hero who struggles and fails and screws up but wins because of her own brilliance. And while in some ways that might make her seem a little vanilla and traditional, in further books there’ll be plenty of time to muddy those waters.
 
I lucked out with Rylee. I started writing her with very little idea of who she was, but she proved to be one of those characters who just writes themselves and from her first snappy lines to Andromache I was immediately clear on who this person is. Irreverent, dismissive, very intelligent, lacking any kind of filter but wise in an easy, unassuming way that the other characters need.
 
Tobias is a slightly more complex proposition. He starts the brooding and judgemental, but gradually reveals someone more lost and sad, someone who doesn’t so much provide a counterpoint to Andromache’s pain as a reflection of it. I’ve wondered occasionally if he’s not distinct enough from the other two, if he combines Andromache’s inner turmoil with Rylee’s science abilities, but I think that’s a fairly surface level reading. As Tobias points out, the demons he grapples with are very different to Andromache’s and his knowledge of science comes from a place not of passion, but almost desperation. Probably more than the other two, Tobias offers the most potential to explore further in books to come but I liked the contrast he provided; the way he argues incessantly with Rylee but relates to Andromache on a deeper level of mutual understanding.
 
Maybe the most important thing for me is that the three of them together feels right. The bond is there and the way they bounce off each other is fun and warm and provides a strong foundation to further adventures.
 
And speaking of adventures…
 
The Worlds
 
A book called Andromache Between Worlds doesn’t get very far without cool worlds. Outside of the deeper themes about facing your own darkness and grappling with the flaws of your parents and the lies you’ve been told, the big selling point of this novel is ‘dangerous adventures in other universes’.
 
But delivering on this was a bit trickier than just saying ‘what totally mad alternate realities can I come up with?’ The worlds have to be different from each other while also tonally suiting what the characters, particularly Andromache, are dealing with. But more than anything else, they have to be interesting.
 
Apart from Andromache’s own world, which is already a bit more heightened than our own, there are four parallel universes that appear in the book. The first, a world of sea monsters and pirates and a land rendered uninhabitable by natural disasters, is more of a table setter than anything else. Still, I had to have at least a vague idea in my head of its mythology; how it came about, what the key conflicts are and so on. But really, the strangeness of castle-sized warships attacked by giant crabs just felt like a visually distinct and exciting way to introduce the parallel universe concept.
 
The second world, predictably, is my favourite; a version of the Wild West that happens to be overrun by dinosaurs. But apart from allowing me the chance to have pistol duels between cowboys interrupted by rampaging T-rexes, this is also the world where Andromache encounters a beyond impressive version of her mother who seems to be a lot happier without a child. The ‘coolness’ of the world and its parallel Promethia becomes the worst thing Andromache can see; a subtextual suggestion that her deepest fear, that her mother never wanted her, might be true. Of course it isn’t, but there was something fun about wrapping such a grim suggestion up in maybe the craziest of all these other realities.
 
The third world was maybe the trickiest balancing act. Unlike the others, this doesn’t offer an alternate history or flight of fantasy, but rather a status quo that pertains directly to Andromache’s family history and the shared mythology of the Boone novels. Namely, what if at the end of The Silhouette and the Sacrifice, arch villain Vincent Black had won?
 
To work on its own terms the world still had to be drastically different from the one our heroes know. So we have cities built upwards rather than outwards, spiralling into the sky and traversed by orbs dangling from a network of wires. A seeming utopia that, in reality, is anything but.
 
Given how dark and ambiguous the middle section of the book is, I wanted the final world to be a contrast but not to lose the gravity of the situation. A version of reality where Ancient Egypt never fell but instead took over the planet, split the difference perfectly for me. It provided a chance for fun visuals and concepts, but the figure of an antagonistic Pharoah desperate to prove himself as worthy of his ancestors also spoke to the themes of the book and provided a clear ‘villain’ for Andromache to defeat at the end via her own cleverness and, of course, the help of her friends.
 
But the Pharoah was never going to be the real big bad. Nor was Lady Black or the pack of marauding raptors. No, for a story that dealt so heavily with the legacy Andromache carries, I needed a threat who, in many ways, encapsulates the very worst of that legacy.
 
Vincent Black
 
Okay, so here’s a confession. I think the final twist in Andromache Between Worlds might be my best yet. And that twist, of course, is the reveal that kindly scientist Cavanaugh Rogers, seemingly determined to help Andromache bring her father home, is none other than Vincent Black, her father’s greatest enemy. The entire plot of the book has been a ruse for Vincent to find and destroy his nemesis.
 
In the context of this novel, Vincent Black is mainly presented as a shadowy bogeyman, spoken about in tones of hushed fear as the megalomaniac that Andromache’s parents became famous for defeating. Vincent hangs over the book but never actually appears – until he does.
 
But of course Andromache belongs to a larger continuity and so does Vincent. It’s no secret or surprise that The Silhouette and the Sacrifice, published print on demand with a limited budget, was the least read of the three Boone Shepard novels, but those who did check it out have met Vincent before. Vincent was always intended to be the man bad guy of the Boone books (check out the first one again if you don’t believe me; he’s very explicitly set up) but what I always liked about him was that he isn’t some genius who has been pulling the strings all along, but rather the result of Boone’s actions throughout the series. He is not the architect of all Boone’s pain – Boone is, inadvertently, the architect of Vincent’s.
 
If the Boone books were about learning from the mistakes of the past, then Vincent Black was the consequence of those mistakes, the catalyst for the final lesson. And unlike the other, more overtly evil villains in those books, Vincent was wounded and human; ruthless and dangerous and unstable but convinced that he, in fact, is the hero of the story.
 
I think this conviction carries over to Andromache. Vincent appears disguised throughout the book, but it’s only in the final scenes that he is fully revealed and where we properly see just how broken and obsessed he is, how deeply tragic despite everything he’s done. Andromache defeats him by using his own schemes against him, and when she very almost consigns him to the same fate he had planned for her father, it’s Tobias, a longtime victim of Vincent’s deceptions and manipulations, who stops her, keeping him on the board for future books.
 
In some ways, Andromache Between Worlds is the story of a girl learning the full scope of who her parents were, the good and the bad, and having to ultimately decide what she believes about them. And for a lot of the book she is led towards bleak revelations, often by Vincent or those loyal to him. In the end, it was only appropriate that she face her parents’ ultimate foe and in doing so come to understand that her mother and father might be imperfect, but there are far worse things to be.
 
What happens next?
 
When I originally developed the idea for Andromache Between Worlds it was supposed to be a trilogy. Each main world was going to be the setting for one book, with Andromache’s ultimate rescue of her father the ending. Condensing it all to one book was not only a practical decision (better to tell the whole story than risk setting up sequels that might never happen), but a storytelling one – by packing so much into one relatively slim volume, there was no way this book could ever drag or linger in one place too long.
 
The problem, however, is that it hasn’t left many obvious places to take another book, unlike other novels of mine. The first Boone ended on a gigantic cliffhanger. The Hunted left obvious loose ends to be picked up in future books. Even an ostensible standalone like The Caretaker has enough ambiguity at the conclusion to continue the story if I’m ever inclined to.
 
But Andromache is somewhat final, to the point where some reviews have commented on it. The villain is defeated. Andromache saves her father, reconnects with her mother, comes to terms with her parents’ past, and finds real friends. The story is done.
 
But.
 
A lack of an obvious next step doesn’t mean there’s no next step. Infinite parallel universes mean infinite new directions Andromache’s story can take. And while the first book ends with Andromache choosing not to keep adventuring, it would not take much to change that.
 
I have a vaguely outlined theory that among the different types of follow ups a story can have, a ‘true’ sequel is one that finds a surprising angle for continuation in a seemingly complete previous instalment. For example, Before Sunrise ends with our two lovers promising to connect again at the same place in six months. The sequel, Before Sunset, reveals that they did not, but when they meet again nine years later their mutual attraction has gone nowhere. The problem is that now they both have adult lives and responsibilities they didn’t have at 23. Further to this, Psycho ends with Norman Bates seemingly consumed by insanity and locked away in an asylum. Psycho II takes the unexpected route of having a genuinely cured Norman released into society twenty years later, only for that society to refuse to believe in his rehabilitation – a bitter and tragic irony that drives him right back to insanity.
 
By not taking the most apparent path forward, these sequels avoid both repetition and episodic, Marvel-esque storytelling where everything is just a blatant set up for the next instalment, resolution be damned.
 
As such, we will quickly learn that there have been hitherto unseen complications to Andromache Peters rescuing her father, complications that will force our central trio into a whole new adventure. I’ve got a fairly clear outline for the second book and a somewhat vaguer one for the third.
 
Beyond that, who knows? But I hope to find out.
 
 

---