The World Gives Way

 by Marissa Levien

This book is set in the future, I assume.   It is about a space ship, rigged to look like the earth, which has been traveling for about 100 years with the destination a distant planet.

The main character, Myrra, is one of the many contract workers who are obliged to work for 50 years before they get their freedom.  She had been sold into contract work after her mother, a contract worker, disappeared.  She was five years old.  Many contract workers seem resigned to their fate but not Myrra, she is working to save money, or get married to someone who can buyout her contract and free her.

Initially she worked in a laundry and later a bakery.  As the book opens she is working as the housekeeper and babysitter for a wealthy connected couple on the ship.  One day she is summoned in the middle of the night to the penthouse by the wife of the family.  The woman commits suicide by jumping off the building, leaving Myrra to care for her daughter.  Before she dies she hints that her husband is dead and that Myrra should help herself to money/cards in the vault.

Myrra goes to her bosses office area and finds he has killed himself in the tub.  As she needs a palm print to open the safe she cuts off his hand.  She is careful to take a card that she thinks was a card for unknown accounts of his.  She sets off with the baby and tries to get out of New London before she can be caught.  Before she leaves Myrra learns that her employers probably killed themselves because the ship was going to collapse soon because of a hole in the hull that could not be repaired.

The deaths are discovered quite quickly and two security officers are sent to find her to charge her with murder and or kidnapping.  She doesn't go to the city they think she will go to.  They go to an underwater city but it starts to collapse because of earthquakes and they only barely escape.  They eventually track Myrra down and she tells them what happened and that the world is going to end but they don't believe her.

Eventually the earthquakes and collapses continue and it is announced that the ship is in danger.  The older of the two security people  decides to leave to return to his family. The other security officer, who is now an orphan as his adopted father died in a building collapse, decides to try to find Myrra.  He knows there is no point arresting her, he just doesn't want to be alone.

They eventually travel through a fake desert and reach the inner and outer hulls of the ship.  They meet someone who knows Myrra's mother and she is able to find out that her mother didn't really abandon her, she was arrested and taken to this hull area to work there.  The young security officer calls his real parents, who are in prison for a variety of crimes, they don't seem to have changed and won't believe him when he tells them the world is going to end.

As the book ends it appears the world will collapse but Myrra and Tobias are glad to be together at the end.

This was an interesting story, very well told.  It did a great job of describing this "created" earth and of the building tension as the story and the catastrophe developed.  I was hoping for a more positive ending but don't know how one could have happened given what was going on and so quickly on the ship.

However, the deaths of the two people are disc