Book Review: The Infinite Miles by Hannah Fergesen

Sometimes, a book comes along that you didn’t know you needed. This was just that. I gulped this book down, unable to stay away. Now, I’m trying to figure out why. Maybe it was the beautiful, haunting prose that pulled me into the story, or perhaps it was the flawed characters that felt ever so familiar, or it could be the concept that felt fresh yet experienced, or all above. Whatever the reason was, I felt a twinge of nostalgia like I had lived through the story before, not as a reader but as a person. And when the book ended, there was this sense of loss: I had lost a limp or, more so, a piece of me. So sometimes a book comes along that is part of you.

The Infinite Miles is an odyssey of time travel and distant galaxies and music that you can hear inside you that speaks of who you are and what you are made of, but you don’t know the lyrics or the melody to. It is a story fleshed out of the song Space Oddity and the promise it gives. It is about that one childhood friend that you lost ever so carelessly, and you want them back because they are who you were, and without them, you are so alone and not you at all. The book is about Harper’s and Peggy’s friendship. Peggy suddenly disappears from Harper’s life, presumed to be missing and dead, but Harper knows that not to be the case. She knows that Peggy left her behind, destroying Harper’s brilliant future as an astrophysicist. She is stuck living the past, watching Infinity Odyssey on repeat to catch a glimpse of life with Peggy while Peggy is gallivanting through the galaxy without her. However, the thing is not that simple, and space and time have their dangers and beings that want you dead. Still, Peggy left Harper behind to live a small, miserable life on planet Earth.

The book’s premise promises a poignant story of Harper being pulled into space and time travel, but it is darker than declared. This one is about that deep feeling you have inside you that poisons your mind and leaves you all sad and bitter. While I found the book beautiful and nourishing, it catered to my melancholic side, not to that curious side that loves to ask questions like what space and time travel could be. I loved the book to bits. It could be because I had a friendship like Harper and Peggy had. A morphed one where I’m both Harper, who focused all her time on her studies, and Peggy as well who left her friend behind. Either way, I had my friend with whom we did everything when we were children, with whom I watched all the odd TV shows with spaceships and aliens, searched the woods for fairies and witches, knew that ghosts were real, that space and time isn’t fixed, that there are ancient civilizations out there, and you can never gaze stars too long. Now, it feels like there are a million miles between us and the life we had. So the sadness Hannah Fergesen wrote about and the distance between Harper and Peggy felt real. So did the ending and how painful it was. It is impossible to get back to what it once was. Like Peggy, we all wear scars from what we have gone through, and sometimes, it is difficult to arrive home to those who knew us. We all grow up. We all become something else than all the possibilities we had as children.

Thank you for reading the review! See you in the future ❤