Getting one thing straight even before the story starts, the author spells out his chief character’s name as an-drom-a-key, defining it as belonging to characters from the Classical period, but also as ‘a really annoying name that parents should think twice about before giving their child’.
As the second in a series about Andromache and her adventures in parallel universes, she is interrupted during a family holiday in Florence, Italy, by a visitor from the Anomaly Regulation Agency (ARA) that tracks down people who are not supposed to be in one world, restoring them to the one they are supposed to inhabit.
With her friends Tobias and Rylee, she joins ARA operatives in the search for an ‘anomaly’ she believes to be the wicked Vincent Black, her parents’ arch nemesis who had escaped from jail. By creating portals to other worlds, they find worlds where robots do all the work for humans; another populated with spiders as big as cars.
Even the ARA base is strange, with tamed dragons who fly around the walkways connecting spheres. All is not as simple as ARA had told Andromache, who also meets another angrier version of herself. The three young adventurers debate the ethics of taking away an individual’s right to think and decide; and discover from Andromache’s father how letting hate and anger go means a person no longer lives in the dark.
Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville
Age Guide 11+
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gabriel Bergmoser is a Melbourne based author and playwright. After starting out in the youth theatre scene with his early plays Windmills, Life Without Me and Hometown, Gabriel completed his Masters of Screenwriting at the Victorian College of the Arts. He co-founded the independent production company Bitten By Productions, entering the Melbourne theatre scene with the one-act comedy Reunion and the futuristic Babylon Trilogy of noir thrillers. Gabriel’s 2015 Beatles comedy We Can Work It Out opened to sell out shows and rave reviews – it has also been performed in Queensland and returned to Melbourne stages for the 2018 Fringe Festival.
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