Into the Parallel

I would have given this 2 stars only I can't stop reading this series so I guess it warrants another star for being compelling.

Otherwise, it's the kind of book that makes me crazy with not being able to suspend my disbelief. You'll notice I tagged it fantasy even though it definitely wants to be sci-fi. Also it's a young adult novel, which isn't its fault, I just tend to be irritated by young adult protagonists.

So first, the main character is a girl (Audie) who is terrible at math but great at physics. So already, I don't believe her. I'm sure you can understand physics to a point without math, learn the theories and whatnot in plain language (that's what I do), but I seriously can't imagine being able to actually BE GOOD at physics, especially in a university setting (which is where Audie wants to go), without understanding the math behind it. Someone, please, prove me wrong, it just doesn't seem possible to me given that physics IS MATH.

The next thing is that Audie somehow figures out (using her unparalleled physics skills, I assume) that “changing your vibrations” can catapult you into an alternate universe. The way she changes her vibrations is by meditating. And she has to be meditating at the same time as her counterpart in an alternate universe is meditating. Which doesn't seem all that hard, so my question is, how come this hasn't been documented before in all of human history? Audie literally disappears when she goes to the other universe, in a human history full of spirituality, I can't imagine that there weren't a lot of people disappearing and coming back with stories of alternate universes. And you don't even have to be good at meditating, Audie had only been doing it for 6 months before it worked for her!

She finds this professor that all the other physics professors laugh at because he does fringe research on vibrations and shit, and in his lab is a grad student who hooks polygraph machines up to plants to measure their stress levels (as if plants show stress in the same way that people do). So really, I'm thinking, yeah, this guy should probably be laughed out of the physics conferences, except that his research turns out to be right, and they explain the fact that he's not respected by claiming that cognitive dissonance and fear is causing the other physicists to not believe the proof that he's showing to them.

Audie meets her alternate self, Halli, who is exactly like her genetically only she was raised to be an adventurer and is therefore buffer and better at problem-solving. I'm assuming this means that their universes split at least just after they were both born, but that's wrong, because their parents are totally different too. So their parents, despite their crazy-different personalities, still managed to get together and have kids at exactly the same time with the exact same gene configuration. I know, I know, infinite universes contain infinite possibilities, it just seems KIND OF CONVENIENT.

And then Audie is also mooning over this love of her life, her best friend's brother, who is dating a caricature of an annoying person. He's the best most selfless and wonderful guy in the entire world and Audie has never told him that she into him, she just licks spoons that he's used when he's not looking. This is where I start to zone out because I hate reading about mooney love-struck teens.

Audie has adventures with Hallie in the alternate world and then shit goes down, right into a serious cliffhanger. At which point I need to decide: do I walk away from this series, or double-down and read three more books? Despite all of the above, the cliffhanger was really serious and amazon's one-click purchase thing with the kindle app is really dangerous so now I'm reading the omnibus.