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enne📚 reviewed Litany for a Broken World by Karen Conlin (Entangled Realities, #1)

Karen Conlin, Chris Howard, L. J. Cohen: Litany for a Broken World (2025, Interrobang Books)

A young girl's disastrous first foray through the multiverse cleaves her from her family and …

Litany for a Broken World

3 stars

There's a lot of neat things going on in this book, but there's also a number of things that didn't quite land for me. I'm struggling to have a solid opinion, so here's a mishmash of drive-by thoughts.

I do love this book's thematic mantra of fixing broken things. It's clear that many characters in this book are broken (emotionally), and it's clear that the Boston timeline is broken (structurally, via capitalism largely), but it's less clear to me what sort of fixing is truly going on, especially in a multiverse sense.

Obviously Martin, Stirling, and Melissa are putting in work for their community, but the rest of it just seems like talk (or something a future book in the series will get to). I wish there was more clarity about how Jace had broken his oath to repair the broken parts of the universe, and what that …

There's a lot of neat things going on in this book, but there's also a number of things that didn't quite land for me. I'm struggling to have a solid opinion, so here's a mishmash of drive-by thoughts.

I do love this book's thematic mantra of fixing broken things. It's clear that many characters in this book are broken (emotionally), and it's clear that the Boston timeline is broken (structurally, via capitalism largely), but it's less clear to me what sort of fixing is truly going on, especially in a multiverse sense.

Obviously Martin, Stirling, and Melissa are putting in work for their community, but the rest of it just seems like talk (or something a future book in the series will get to). I wish there was more clarity about how Jace had broken his oath to repair the broken parts of the universe, and what that oath actually means to Jace and Corinne. (Has Harnett sworn this same oath? Also, what is this oath as compared to the Network's "greatest good" motto??)

I think the pacing of the end of the book is also a little harmed by this being part of a series. There's clearly a climactic confrontation, but it largely feels unresolved, leaving lots of pieces for the future.

This sounds like a lot of complaints, but I enjoyed my read here. I do love a telepathic dog. I love the idea of talking to a therapist about portals to other worlds. I love Jace and Corinne working together for a shared goal while also being so misaligned. I love Martin still working to care for Reina even when Reina is not his sister. Overall, my favorite part of this book was all of the characters.

(This was the #SFFBookClub book for March 2026.)

enne📚 replied to enne📚's status

I have a few more minor rambling thoughts about Litany for a Broken World too, which I'll separate out into this comment.

This is my own fault for coming into a book with expectations, but the blurb I read focuses on three strangers. I was thus a bit surprised that all nine major characters in the book (including the dog!) get their own point of view chapters, and this jumping around didn't quite work for me as a reader. It felt a bit unfocused to me, but maybe it worked well for some other reader. Additionally, Harnett getting his own chapter also removed some of the ambiguity around Jace and Corinne's conflict. It would have been more effective for me to have him be a bit of an enigma (and fill in his backstory later, if needed).

Jace and Corinne's conflict was really intriguing to me, but I feel like the resolution fizzled. There's betrayal, mistrust, and ambiguity about the nature of the Network, RDD, and Harnett. But then there's a moment during the climax, where Harnett repeats the facts that Corinne believes (as far as I could tell), and Corinne suddenly wonders "is this actually true?" without much reason at all. It didn't feel like a believable moment of doubt to me.

Finally, I do love a multiverse story, but I wish a little that there had been more explanation or differentiation in the other worlds. I don't know that they quite felt that different or unique. Is the handwave at "you can't travel to any world that's too close" the way that you don't meet your own self in another world? Mostly I have just seen a number of stories doing this sort of thing, and so I'm intrigued about the mechanics of this universe. This book just doesn't really get into any of them.

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