I was sent a copy of this book for an honest review.

A very interesting book, combining life in South London with time travel. I was a bit confused at the end.

#Netgalley #TheUpperWorld

Femi Fadugba's The Upper World is an addictive, explosive YA sci-fi thriller that will sweep you up and slam you down. It is a love affair of science and drama, of logic and heart. It is a timely comment on race and class, on opportunities and having none at all. It is a story of letting go of the past, of accepting what cannot be changed and opening up to the future. And, challenging as it no doubt is, it is ultimately hopeful.

Written as two intertwining stories, one set in 2020 and another in 2035, Fadugba's debut follows Esso and Rhia as they uncover their linked pasts, presents and futures. It moves at pace yet is full of substance. The characters are authentic, helped by the language, technology and society of their worlds and how these differ in fifteen years. Fadugba shows what might have changed with each of these - slang, police drones, fast food companies becoming tech giants - and what, depressingly, might not - gang culture, surveillance, men in vans catcalling teenage girls. In a book about time travel, this realism makes it all the more believable. It's there from intriguing start to breathtaking finish. No wonder you become so invested.

Beyond its poignant story, The Upper World is a celebration of physics and sci-fi. It makes a nod to classics of the genre but stands squarely on its own two feet. The sums may have gone over my head, but the result didn't: this is a game-changer. This book shows any doubters that POC and own voices stories are not a sales aid or a fad, they are truly great books that should rightly be mainstream. They are unique yet universal and they are here to stay. Bring me more.

This book makes me wish I’d paid more attention in physics at school. However, as I didn’t, I struggled at times with the storyline but it didn’t spoil the enjoyment of reading this. Esso and Rhia are living 15 years apart in South London, with the same point in time meaning so much to them both. Both teenagers are characters that make you care about them, the writing is easily readable although some of the language was difficult to understand for me but then I’m not the demographic this book is aimed at. I was impressed with the authentic feel of it, and can see why it’s been snapped up by Netflix. A star in this genre.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.

A deeply unique, masterfully plotted time travel adventure spanning generations. Accurate science combined with fun, vividly realistic characters - what's not to love?

I requested this book as it sounded great and the cover was beautiful. And it didn't disappoint. There were parts I didn't understand and the language sometimes just wasn't for me (not surprising as it I am no longer a YA!) but overall o enjoyed this story and read it surprisingly fast!

This was an unusual and interesting book, and I loved the physics and maths, which happily all made sense. The hardest part of the read for me was the colloquial language, which might be great for some readers but perhaps less so for someone of my generation. but I'm sure that the book isn't aimed at me, so I have not marked it down for this.
I did enjoy the way that the different plots came together, and it was a hard book to put down - it was easy to empathise with the characters and to care about what happened to them. I liked the way the ending was resolved.
It is obvious that the author is well versed in the science which comes up in this book, and I would imagine that it could be quite inspirational to the right younger reader.

I loved the dialogue in this. It's spot on. Great to see younger vernacular in a YA book. And I liked the world-building, in terms of the gritty inner London life and the time travel.. But for me, the book didn't have quite enough STORY. So much space was given to character interaction, world building and physics that the plot suffered. It felt more like the wonderful set-up to a story rather than a story itself. Will be interesting to see what the film adaptation does. I suspect they'll add in more story to compensate. Will watch and see!

The Upper World is a sci-fi time travel novel with incredible world building!
Esso is running out of time and into trouble. When he discovers he has the ability to see glimpses of the future, he becomes haunted by a vision of a bullet fired in an alleyway with devastating consequences.

A generation later, fifteen-year-old Rhia is desperately searching for answers - and a catastrophic moment from the past holds the key to understanding the parents she never got to meet.
An intriguing tale which flits forwards and backwards in time as we follow two connected characters in their quest to navigate their current troubles and understand where they fit in the world. The author included heavy references to theoretical/quantum physics and relating equations but explained it in a way which was easy(ish) to understand.
Fast paced and full of sci fi and science, a perfect teens/young adult read.
Thank you to Penguin Random House children’s UK and Netgalley for an eARC of this book in return for an honest review.

Such a gorgeous cover.
I can’t pretend to fully understand the maths / science within this, but it was a fascinating, compelling, and fast paced read

WOW. This breathtaking time travel story blew my actual mind. A truly epic sci fi thriller that makes maths feel EXTREMELY cool. A very powerful message about self-belief too. Just incredible. And the characters are so richly developed, especially Esso. We step right into his world complete with his school crush and a some very heated gang rivalry. These are characters and a setting we don't normally see paired with epic time travel action and WHY THE HELL NOT?! An outstanding book and I'm still thinking about it.

My response to The Upper World, was mixed. Some parts of the narrative were engrossing while other parts left me frankly baffled and thus confused by the action that followed.
My first wobble came with the preface, ‘Letter 1’ from ‘Blaise Adenon’s Notebook’. This paraphrases the famous allegory of the cave from Plato’s Republic. The prisoners in the cave have watched shadows flickering on the wall of the cave all their lives. This is their ‘reality’. Then one of the prisoners escapes the cave and sees the real world. The allegory is usually interpreted as an explanation of how we know things. The prisoner returns to the cave but no one wants to know the higher reality he has seen and threaten to kill him. So, I thought, this is a novel about epistemology. I clung to this idea until it became clear that this was, in fact, a novel about time travel. So I don’t really understand what point the allegory was making in this context. Unless it’s about the one who breaks free and is threatened for his knowledge? But why use the allegory of the cave to do this?

Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the male protagonist Esso (I’m not going to review this chapter by chapter, by the way) and I was hooked from the first sentence. Esso lives with his mother on an estate in Brixton. He is still at school and, as the novel starts, has actually learned something in class. The school sits on the border between Peckham and Brixton and Esso says, ‘once the mandem arrived… you had kids from two rival ends forced to spend seven hours a day with each other, and the rest of us expected to learn with that in the background.’ Esso gets caught up in the gang warfare through ‘an impressive mix of stupidity and bad luck’ as he tells the reader. Esso is immediately established as wry, funny, self-aware, everything that makes for an engaging narrator. He fancies a girl in the class, Nadia, who is trying hard to get her GCSEs.

Chapter 2 introduces the female protagonist Rhia. Her story happens 15 years later than Esso’s. Again a very likeable narrator – she lives in foster care, plays football (and hopes to take it up professionally) and is clever, resilient, mouthy and anxious. She longs to know what happened to her mother who died when she was a baby – and this is the link between Esso’s narrative and Rhia’s. I had another moment of bafflement here. 15 years after Esso’s narrative timeline (which I took to be the present) Rhia has contact lenses which obey voice commands. This was not the only example of futuristic technology in Rhia’s narrative. What was the purpose of this technology in the story? It didn’t serve any purpose other than to signal to the reader that this narrative occurs later than Esso’s. Since every chapter featuring Rhia is labelled (t + 15 years) I think I know that. She is given a tutor who turns out to be adult Esso who is blind. Rummaging through his bag she finds an old notebook and a picture of her mother as a girl. I thought I could see where this was going. Nadia is the girl whom Esso fancies and who is Rhia’s mother.

Then I was baffled again by the excerpt from ‘Blaise Adenon’s notebook’, Letter 2. He wants to tell his son Esso about the Upper World. And here the lessons on physics and time start. Some of it I understood, most of it I didn’t. And my bewilderment affected my enjoyment of the book. I see the author is a physicist and maybe the physics he writes about is obvious to him but it really wasn’t to me and I started skipping those bits. This meant that I had trouble understanding the following action and the point that the novel finally reached. This is a book for Young Adults. I am not a member of the target audience, being Older Adult. I am however educated to degree-level (obviously not in physics) and I was quite baffled. Will Young Adults understand this stuff about light and time and WINDOWS? What are they teaching kids in school these days because it’s light years away from what I remember of my physics lessons at school (I don’t remember much except Bunsen burners, to be honest. Or was that chemistry?) Does one need to understand this to enjoy the book? And what’s it got to do with Plato and the allegory of the cave? I was baffled.

Anyway, to cut a long story of bewilderment and enjoyment short, Esso collides head-on with a moving car which propels him into the Upper World. Here he sees events which are going to happen to him and those around him. There is an event that he wants not to happen: a confrontation between two gangs in which Nadia gets caught up. I don’t want to say too much about this because I don’t want to spoil the ending but the action from this point revolves about avoiding this confrontation and both Esso and Rhia are involved.

So, to sum up… I enjoyed this novel because the protagonists are thoroughly likeable teenagers with whom the reader engages and cheers on to the end. I loved the English they speak – although I did have to look up quite a few words. And they live in a community I know very little about (despite having lived not so far away from Brixton/Peckham for much of my life). What little I do ‘know’ comes from media representations of the community and the gang violence. Fadugba challenges this representation of a community engulfed by a violent gang-culture. The gangs are there, the violence seems self-perpetuating but it is not just what this community is about. The teenagers in this novel, as Esso points out at the very beginning, are growing up in circumstances which threaten to overwhelm them: Esso in a single-parent family, Rhia in foster-care, both of them affected by the gang violence which surrounds them. But they are not overwhelmed, they are smart, resilient, resourceful and funny.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to read this novel - I thoroughly enjoyed it. I read it from the perspective of a teacher/librarian as I am very much looking to broaden the school curriculum. I think this book will be enjoyed by many and I will be ordering this book in to the school library when it is released. The time travel aspect was really well done and it was great to have a diverse book that is still grounded in so much science. It is definitely one for my reluctant readers as it was an absolute tour de force that I just could not put down.

I am not normally a huge fan of time travel in books. I don’t know why. But in this it felt so fresh and I actually really enjoyed it a lot. The book itself was very well written, incredibly gripping and an absolute page-turner. I can totally see why there is so much hype around this one. Not to be missed.

An intriguing tale which flits forwards and backwards in time as we follow two connected characters in their quest to navigate their current troubles and understand where they fit in the world. The author included heavy references to theoretical/quantum physics and relating equations but explained it in a way which was easy(ish) to understand.

The pace did unfortunately slow down about midway through the book. I think I must have spent a week or two moving from 50 to 60% but then it picked back up again. The dialogue was a bit boggy at times and could have been tightened up. It's still head and shoulders above some other books I've read. and understandable for a debut novel from a physicist-turned-author.

Overall though I really enjoyed visiting this world and it's characters. The ending was cute and I'm not surprised Netflix have already picked up the film rights. I could almost see it page to screen and will definitely check out the adaptation.

I was excited for this as soon as I read the deal announcement & it did not disappointed. The world feels fresh and the plot offers many compelling twists that made the book impossible to put down

Woah. Every now and then you find a book that takes you to a completely unexpected place, and The Upper World really did that for me. An action-packed mash-up of gang warfare, physics, street violence, philosophy and time travel..

Fifteen years apart, Esso and Rhia are living in South London and navigating their way around the local criminal gangs and pushing against society's less-than-spectacular expectations of them. When Esso gets injured in a car accident he accesses the Upper World, a place beyond our reality, which gives him a terrifying glimpse of his own future. The book explores the idea that there's so much more to reality than what we see, while showing us some of the separate worlds that exist in our own neighbourhood. In the future when people tell me YA fiction can't be literary or innovative, I'm going to point them in the direction of this book.

Really sorry, but I didn’t like this book. The first time I started to read it I gave up a third of the way through because I was so confused and bored. I tried, I really did. A week later I tried again, and although I read it to the end it was not an enjoyable experience and I was still confused. I didn’t like the jumping from past to present to future, the letters from Blaise Adenon, the language used, the maths references and descriptions, the story, or any of the characters. It was part of the description that made me request this book – “Prepare to stop time with the most epic page-turner you’ll read all year.” I should have read the full description more carefully, because I now realise it mentions time travel. If I’d seen that before I never would have requested it. I’m happy for the author that it is going to be a Netflix film, but I won’t be watching it.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the advanced copy in return for an honest review.

Esso is a teenager running out of time and into trouble. When he discovers he has the ability to see glimpses of the future, he becomes haunted by a vision of a bullet fired in an alleyway with devastating consequences. A generation later, orphaned Rhia is desperately searching for answers. A catastrophic gunfight in an alleyway fifteen years before holds the key to understanding the parents she never got to meet. When Esso and Rhia's fates collide over one desperate moment, a race against the clock becomes a race against time itself.

A perfect, sci-fi YA read. It has everything you need for an easy, read and glimpse into the future. Any sci-fans would love this. This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and would read more of their work. The book cover is eye-catching and appealing and would spark my interest if in a bookshop. Thank you very much to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.

3.5/5.

An intriguing, if slightly confusing, novel, The Upper World is a sci-fi time travel novel with incredible world building!

The characters were a little weak, and I didn't really feel any connection to any of them. However, the plot was strong and I still enjoyed the book overall!

I received a copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you netgalley for the opportunity to read the upper world.
While this book was slightly confusing to begin with all the science/time travel talk and different times of 2020 and 2035 I ended up really enjoying this and could not put it down. Really looking forward to it hitting Netflix