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    Finna
    Finna
    Finna
    Ebook112 pages1 hour

    Finna

    By Nino Cipri

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    “A magical anti-capitalist adventure.” —Annalee Newitz

    Nino Cipri's Finna is a rambunctious, touching story that blends all the horrors the multiverse has to offer with the everyday awfulness of low-wage work. It explores queer relationships and queer feelings, capitalism and accountability, labor and love, all with a bouncing sense of humor and a commitment to the strange.

    When an elderly customer at a Swedish big box furniture store — but not that one — slips through a portal to another dimension, it’s up to two minimum-wage employees to track her across the multiverse and protect their company’s bottom line. Multi-dimensional swashbuckling would be hard enough, but those two unfortunate souls broke up a week ago.

    To find the missing granny, Ava and Jules will brave carnivorous furniture, swarms of identical furniture spokespeople, and the deep resentment simmering between them. Can friendship blossom from the ashes of their relationship? In infinite dimensions, all things are possible.

    At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateFeb 25, 2020
    ISBN9781250245724
    Author

    Nino Cipri

    Nino Cipri is a queer and trans/nonbinary writer, editor, and educator. They are a graduate of the 2014 Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and earned their MFA in fiction from the University of Kansas. A multidisciplinary artist, Nino has also written plays, screenplays, and radio features; performed as a dancer, actor, and puppeteer; and worked as a stagehand, bookseller, bike mechanic, and labor organizer. They are the author of Homesick, a World Fantasy Award finalist and Dzanc Short Fiction Collection Prize winner, and the novellas Finna, a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Lambda awards, and Defekt, a British Fantasy Award winner and finalist for the Philip K. Dick and Locus awards. Dead Girls Don't Dream is their young adult debut.

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    Reviews for Finna

    3.5/5

    240 ratings27 reviews

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      This was so good and fun! It reminded me of an episode of Love Death + Robots
    • 5/5
      This was such a great, fun, weird novella/short story. I loved the writing style and it’s social commentary. Plus the IKEA-inspired world it’s set in is hilarious. Jump into the multiverse!
    • 3/5
      Angsty queer story in a futuristic world with some time travel shenanigans. I wanted a bit more from both aspects, but it was fun for a novella.
    • 4/5
      Such a short book with a lot inside. Some version of Ikea where wormholes just open up and customers get lost in them. The poor junior employees have to go after them and bring them, or some alternate universe version of them, back. The characters are thoughtful and genuine, especially given how little time we have with them. The alternate universes are bizarre and exciting.
    • 3/5
      This was a cute sci-fi/fantasy romp. I like the multiverse premise and enjoyed some of the humor. I saw somewhere that this was compared to the Hitchhiker's Guide series, and I think that comparison is apt. However, the characters weren't super compelling to me. I wanted them to be developed more separate from watching them react to their environment. Nonetheless, I will probably read more in this series as they come out. I think there is great potential for the series.
    • 3/5
      The setting, premise, concept and characters were good. The plot was okay, the relationship I didn't care about, and the attitude towards the capitalist machine just read juvenile. I think this would have been better as a fully fleshed out novel. As it is, it just didn't make me care about anything.
    • 3/5
      Clever idea, but the bitchy protagonists wore out their welcome.
    • 4/5
      Weird and good. There's a lot about a broken relationship, and one character is...agender? They use they/them, anyway. Both of these are major points, but they're integrated into the story, not the distractions such things mostly are. The concept is really cool and interesting (especially the part about the wormholes popping up anywhere someone gets lost and disoriented!), and all together it makes a really good story. I'd love to see these characters again, maybe as secondaries in some else's story.
    • 5/5
      Fascinating book of multiversal reality linked into an IKEA pastiche/parody. Great characters with an intriguing nonbinary character
    • 3/5
      A science fiction novella about two people going into a portal of a furniture store that leads to other dimensions to find a lost person. The story is interesting mainly just due to its gimmick. There wasn't much of an actual, interesting storyline. It does have commentary of capitalism and work environment.
    • 3/5
      Weird little story that was quite enjoyable.
      The gender identity of the characters did feel a little forced. Maybe it would have worked better in a longer story, now it felt a little tagged on.
    • 3/5
      The concept was more interesting than the execution, which was competent but didn't engage me.
    • 5/5
      This was a really fun quick read, with a great blend of action, cosmic horror, and super relatable characters.
    • 3/5
      I hadn't realised (or at least hadn't remembered) from reviews that this was a novella so its brevity took me by surprise. It was a fun read while it lasted though! The point-of-view character and her enby ex work in Totally-Not-Ikea, a furniture store so labyrinthine that periodically wormholes form leading to its counterpart in other parallel universes. They get voluntold to rescue a lost customer from one of these universes, and between the carnivorous furniture, hivemind foodcourt, and their personal and relationship baggage, much drama ensues. While the angst is real and complex, the dangers they face are mostly on the level of the absurd, so ultimately it's a fun and easy read.
    • 4/5
      Hilarious novella involving disgruntled customer service workers (at an IKEA-like store), liminal spaces, wormholes, and carnivorous furniture. Ava and Jules, who broke up very recently, must go on an adventure together.

      Very queer.

      OMG there is a sequel.
    • 2/5
      There were plenty of things I did enjoy about this book: A gender fluid main character with they/them pronouns, and the love interest representing LGBTQIA was awesome, the premise was also very interesting with a rift in the multi-verse, and the realistic characters. However, It felt like there were things missing. I didnt feel like there was very much character development, the details weren't always enough to really pull me into the scenery no matter how weird they got, and the book left me feeling like there were 100 pages missing to build out the story, characters, and plot even more.

      All in all I am glad I read this book, but I wouldnt recommend it if you are looking for good Sci-fi, or a good LGBTQIA relationship book, which were the two things I personally was looking for.
    • 4/5
      One has here a novella about exasperating couples, portals between worlds, big-box stores as centers of cosmic horror, and the notion that the pursuit of meaning might be more important than meaning itself. I enjoyed it but I can see where some folks might find it a one gag throwaway.
    • 5/5
      Fun, super fast, funny adventure through "only my second job". I got a good laugh and related to a lot of this.
    • 5/5
      Listen. I have convinced more people to go out and buy a copy of this book, read it and LOVE it than any other book, excepting the two I have published myself. This is a fun, weird, messy multi-verse portal fantasy (sort of) with a queer relationship falling apart and made up of critiquing the inhuman economics of corporate big-box chain stores. It's got spectacularly weird world-building and the way our bullshit capitalist systems exacerbate mental illness, and finding yourself in the face of absurdity.

      I loved this book fiercely and I have spent a lot of time screaming at people about how much.
    • 2/5
      Ava and Jules recently had a painful breakup, which is made worse by the fact that they both work at the same LitenVärld, an IKEA knockoff store. When a coworker calls in sick, Ava reluctantly agrees to come in only to discover that Jules is also working that day. Then a customer's grandmother goes missing, and Ava and Jules are suddenly forced to work together to find the woman, a task that will involve traveling through multiple wormholes to multiple LitenVärld variations.

      I checked this out for multiple reasons. First, I needed an audiobook that could get me through the ride to and from the airport, and this was almost exactly the length I needed. Second, the description made me think "Horrorstör but sci-fi." I still haven't been inside an actual IKEA, but I seem to be drawn to stories set in IKEA knockoffs.

      Sadly, this didn't really work for me, and I might not have finished it if it hadn't been for the whole "captive audience in need of something to listen to" airport trip. It started off okay (I really liked Ava's names for the various LitenVärld display rooms, like the "Nihilist Bachelor cube"), but I felt like it wasted its parallel universe LitenVärld potential. Ava and Jules traveled to, if I remember correctly, maybe three different parallel universe LitenVärlds, but only one of them was recognizable as a store. I was really hoping for more skewed big-box store moments, although I did like the chair in the first one.

      Ava and Jules' relationship issues were a drag to listen to. Ava was the one who'd initiated the breakup, in large part due to the strain her own anxiety plus Jules' more adventurous and risk-taking personality put her under. Jules (a nonbinary character) had their own baggage, and as a result the two of them never really sat down and talked any of it through, so it was hurt feelings and strain all around. Meanwhile, I just wanted freaky LitenVärld variations.

      (Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)
    • 3/5
      {First of 2(?) LitenVerse series; urban fantasy, parallel universes, adventure} (2020)

      This was an intriguing concept where two workers (just-broken-up partners) work in ho-hum jobs at a furniture store (with a sky blue and sunflower yellow logo, so not one you'd know) and discover a dimensional wormhole. Apparently this is a not unheard of occurrence and connects our world's version of LitenVärld with LitenVärlds in other universes, some of which may be inimical. Since staff cutbacks have dispensed with the division that deals with such wormholes, Ava and her ex, Jules (who is genderless and very touchy about being assigned a gender by customers), are - as the two newest employees - volunteered to find the elderly customer who has wandered across the divide with only the 'FINNA' device and a quick viewing of a video (as in on a VHS cassette) to help them. The FINNA can locate the missing customer and then point the way back to our universe in case the original wormhole collapses.

      Since the original wormhole does collapse, they have to work their way back to our Earth via other worlds, each with their own unique version of LitenVärld. And their own unique dangers.

      Told from Ava's point of view, the book also deals with the relationship between the two protagonists. I found the different versions of the world interesting but the book was quite short and didn't really have time to explore the worlds nor for me to establish a rapport with the characters; there were some instances where I thought I should have been shocked but I was still processing the different worlds and so they just felt like part of the narrative.

      I also found the use of 'them', 'they' etc in referring to Jules quite confusing, especially when the words were used in both the singular and plural (referring to both Jules and Ava together) in the same paragraph although I appreciate that both Jules and the author don't want to be assigned a gender.

      I did enjoy the story, short as it was, and look forward to reading the sequel.

      August 2021
      3 stars
    • 5/5
      This manages to be both a romp from start to finish, and sad and tragic at various times. Starting in a knock-off IKEA, the story forces exes Ava and Jules together -- there is a lot of unfinished business that starts getting sorted out in this slight book, and yet that is somehow the B plot.

      The world building is exquisite - from the very start, with Ava getting off the bus, then through the various alternate worlds that our protagonists get thrown through. The characters are equally well written, being unhappy and broken but entirely sympathetically written. Unlike other very depressed and anxious characters, Ava does not seem over wrought, nor unbelievable. And on top of all this, the author has managed to fit in a biting commentary on big box stores, corporate culture, and the evils of capitalism.

      Highly recommended.
    • 3/5
      Finna was a book I picked up at random because the premise of a SF story set in a Swedish-style furniture store (but not THAT furniture store) somehow appealed to me.
      This was a great little read which told the story of what happened after Jules and Ava broke up but still had to work together at the same furniture store in jobs they both hate.
      As if things couldn't be worse, when an old lady disappears in the store, Jules and Ava are sent to find her. This is when they discover that the maze made up different tiny apartments actually leads to another world.

      I really liked the inventiveness of this story. I LOVED that this was not a romance but was set after a break-up. I really liked that we don't get told everything about Jules and Ava right from the start but that we need to invest time in the story to get to know them.
      I really liked the ending.

      However, I felt this was too short. It's a novella, really, but some parts felt rushed and could have done with a bit more fleshing out.
      Still, I will probably read the sequel to this.
    • 5/5
      Ava and Jules work at a big box furniture store. They're also in the immediate aftermath of a really painful breakup a few days ago.

      This chain, LitenVärld, has a little problem with wormholes occasionally opening up and swallowing customers. They don't make a point of telling employees that, especially not new employees. It cold be bad for the bottom line. They used to have a division, Finna, whose job was to go through the wormhole and retrieve the customer--or the nearest available substitute. The Finna division was disbanded for budgetary reasons, so now the policy is to send the two lowest-paid employees after the customer.

      In this store, on this day, that's Ava and Jules, who are currently having difficulty even speaking to each other. But these are the only jobs they have, and the alternative to accepting the assignment is termination.

      Into the wormhole they go.

      The Finna device they've been given points them toward the missing customer, or that best available substitute, but it's neither quick, nor easy, nor safe. They find a world of carnivorous furniture, a world where LitenVärld is a hive, and they aren't members of the local hive...

      And a world where they're dumped into the sea, but a submarine surfaces just in time to save them. It's here that they start to get some answers, and may have found that "best available substitute"--if the woman thinks she has any reason to go with them. Except they went through that hive, and they've brought danger chasing after them. Will they even survive?

      Along the way, Ava and Jules learn an awful lot about themselves, each other, the multiverse they live in, and the life choices they've made.

      It's a bit crazy, exciting, really interesting. Recommended.

      I bought this book.
    • 4/5
      I read this novella as part of my Nebula finalist packet.

      The concept of this snared me from the start: workers from a store blatantly based off IKEA, dealing with worm hole shenanigans in their store. As a night stocker who served time in Walmart lo many years ago, I think I had such close scrapes myself. The relationship drama between the two main characters grated on me for a while, as they verged on Too Stupid to Live Territory, but they soon found new priorities (i.e. staying alive in alternate dimension IKEAs where 'mother' is not exactly a loving figure toward presumed interlopers). The ending was full of delightful surprises, and left me with a big smile. In all, an incredibly fun novella, and I'd love to read more in the series.
    • 4/5
      Ava works at an IKEA knock-off store. She has just broken up with Jules, and dreads seeing them at work. Then a wormhole opens up in the store and swallows a customer, and Ava and Jules are sent into the wormhole to retrieve the customer. The book is a scathing commentary on how big corporations force their underpaid employees to do scary and dangerous things, and the employees don't really have much choice if they want to continue to survive. That message has become much more relevant in the past few months as grocery store workers and delivery drivers have been forced to risk their lives to work in minimum wage jobs during a pandemic, with nothing more than signs saying "you're a hero!" to acknowledge what we're putting them through.

      The book is too short to really have any message other than "capitalism sucks" and "friendship is important," which is too bad because I think this could have been fleshed out and expanded into something more than just a quick adventure. There was a lot of character development, but it was crammed into a such a short story that it felt trite and predictable - if the characters had had more time to explore their feelings, the development would have felt more genuine.
    • 5/5
      FINNA by Nino Cipri is an amusing novella set in a thinly veiled Ikea store in the US. It features wormholes to parallel universes, and two employees who recently broke up and have not yet worked through the awkward post-breakup period.

      I really enjoyed FINNA. As is my habit, I had forgotten what it was about (aside from thinking that it was vaguely Scandinavian which it was, emphasis on the vaguely). The opening of the book sets the scene with a focus on the protagonist’s general misery from her retail job and more specific misery from her recent breakup. It gave me just enough time to wonder what the speculative fiction element was going to be before introducing the wormholes. Then it turned into a fun and slightly absurd adventure story as Ava and Jules are forced to go on a rescue mission.

      Since this is a relatively short read, I'm not sure there's very much more I can say without skirting spoilers, so I will leave you with one final opinion. I really liked that this wasn't a romance story. Ava and Jules were a couple, now they're not and the story arc is absolutely not about them getting back together. I'm not sure I've come across this as a central focus of a spec fic book before. I highly approve of the depiction of healthy non-romantic relationships in books.

      I highly recommend FINNA if you enjoy universe hopping and/or slightly absurd science fiction. Or if you hate Ikea (personally, I don't get the Ikea hate, but whatever). I will certainly be keeping an eye on other books and stories I come across by Cipri.

      4.5 / 5 stars

      You can read more of my reviews on my blog.

    Book preview

    Finna - Nino Cipri

    CHAPTER ONE

    The bus abandoned Ava on the outskirts of LitenVärld’s vast parking lot, nearly three-quarters of a mile from the doors. The box store stuck out like a giant square pimple on the landscape, which had been scraped into gently undulating drifts of snow by February’s wind. Ava marched grimly toward the exterior, painted a cheery sky-blue and sunflower-yellow. The parking lot was mostly empty; it was a Tuesday and the weather was shit. Who would want to go shopping today?

    Fucking Derek, she muttered into the wind, cursing the coworker who’d called in sick. If the world were even the slightest bit fair, she’d be home in bed, alternating Netflix binges with long intermissions to listen to Florence and the Machine and actively feel like shit. That’s what she wanted from her days off: equal time to nourish her heartbreak and distract from it. That’s all she’d been doing since she broke up with Jules, three days before.

    LitenVärld was the bastard offspring of more popular big box stores, hanging in the margins between home goods giants and minimalist furniture mavens. It compromised between clean Scandinavian design and bougie Americana by selling furnishings that displayed neither virtue. Instead of sections, the store ushered shoppers through an upsetting and uncoordinated procession of themed showrooms, which bounced from baroque to postmodern design. The showrooms sat next to each other uneasily, like habitats in a hyper-condensed zoo. Here was the habitat for the Pan-Asian Appropriating White Yoga Instructor, complete with tatami mats and a statue of Shiva; next to it huddled the Edgelord Rockabilly Dorm Room, with black leather futon and Quentin Tarantino posters.

    Ava made her way to Her Majesty’s Romper Room, a princess-themed play area, which had a doorway to the break room and time clock. It gave Ava a headache if she paid too much attention as she walked through the store, even using the shortcuts only staff knew about. The best she could do was to shut off her peripheral vision and focus only on her goal.

    Maybe Jules won’t show up today, Ava thought as she squeezed past the gaudy miniature throne. Ava had told Jules that she needed space, and had changed her schedule so that she wouldn’t have to see them at work. Jules had listened grimly, then shrugged and said, I’m not going to fight over territory I don’t want to be in anyway. I hate that place.

    Ava wasn’t quite willing to hope that they’d gotten fired, but a generalized wish that Jules wouldn’t be at the store? That felt okay. They were already on their last excused absence for the quarter; maybe they’d just quit.

    Ava clung to that thought—that Jules might not be at LitenVärld today—hating that it brought her so much comfort. She clocked in, dumped her stuff in her locker, and got ready to go out onto the floor. She would have had to come back here anyway on Tuesday. She could do this.

    As she turned the corner out of the break room, Ava collided with her ex.

    Crap, sorry, Jules said, sounding distracted. Then Jules caught sight of who they were talking to, and froze. Ava? What are you doing here?

    Jules had brought the cold in with them, ice clinging to their jacket and the thin ends of their twists, melted snow coursing down their brown skin. They smelled like wet wool and Old Spice, which had always been improbably attractive. Ava backed out of the danger zone, back into the smell of stale coffee and ancient crusts of food splatter from the microwave that emanated from all break rooms.

    I got called in, Ava said. Fucking Derek is sick.

    Jules looked panicked. Ava felt bad for them; she’d been prepared for this to happen, and they hadn’t.

    It’s just for today, she added.

    Okay, Jules said. They were visibly pulling themself back together. I’m just gonna—

    The two of them did that annoying dance forced on any two people who wanted to get past each other in a narrow space. Finally, Ava backed all the way against the wall, waving Jules past her.

    Look, just go, she snapped.

    Jules opened their mouth to snap back, then shut it and moved past her. As they did, Ava caught sight of the scarf around Jules’s neck; light green dotted with blue, brown, and gray, crocheted with thick yarn. She’d made it for Jules for Christmas. In retrospect, the project had sprung from a desperate hope that the two of them might come together again, stitch fragile connections over the yawning holes opening up between them.

    Is that … ? she asked, gesturing.

    Jules looked puzzled, then glanced down with a tense grimace. Jules’s emotions were always written clear on their face, and they looked like they’d found a snake wrapped around their neck.

    Never mind, Ava said, and fled down the hallway, onto the shop floor.

    * * *

    Ava volunteered for shifts at the customer service desk with Tricia, their manager, to keep far away from Jules in stocking and assembly. Heartache felt like a persistent hangover: lethargy, a headache, an unshakeable belief in the cruelty of the world, drifting outside of time. It was hard to keep up the bullshit facade of industriousness when she felt entirely dead inside. The minutes dragged by as Ava attempted to look busy while Tricia hovered behind her.

    A young woman with olive skin and thick, black-brown hair approached the desk, and Ava turned toward her desperately. Good morning, she said, trying to inject some cheerfulness into her voice—mostly for Tricia’s benefit. Ava thought she sounded strangled.

    Hi, the woman said. I’m sorry to bother you, but I think I lost my grandmother.

    Lost her? asked Ava.

    She was right behind me in the showrooms? I turned around to get her opinion, and she was gone. I’ve been looking for her for ten minutes and … She trailed off, shrugging helplessly. Ava turned to find Tricia, then flinched back when she saw the manager already looming behind her. She hadn’t even heard Tricia approach.

    I’m so sorry to hear that, Tricia said gravely. She had donned one of her Managerial Faces that Jules had reportedly seen her practicing alone in her office: Calm And In Charge. She tilted her head, the blond highlights in her midwestern manager-class haircut catching the light. Let me make an announcement over the PA system. What’s her name?

    Ursula, the young woman replied. Ursula Nouri.

    Tricia nodded, her face serious as she picked up the phone and pressed a button. Her voice came squawking out of the overhead speakers. Good morning, shoppers. Would Ursula Nouri please meet her party at the customer service desk? Ursula Nouri to the customer service desk, please.

    Ava tried to smile reassuringly at the young woman. Tricia treated everything with the gravity usually reserved for state funerals and hostage negotiations.

    Tricia set the phone back down in the cradle. Can you tell me what your grandmother was wearing?

    The girl nodded. "She had on a red coat and some purple fleece gloves. Oh, and a leather purse. I’ve got a picture of her, if that

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