The Side Step Trilogy

About The Side Step Trilogy

Teenager Laz Delatorre discovers he isn't like anyone else around him: he can send his mind sideways into other versions of himself living out different lives in parallel worlds, briefly steering their choices before snapping back to his own body. It's a strange, secret trick until the morning he wakes up in a derelict cloning facility on what looks like an abandoned, ruined Earth, surrounded by hundreds of motionless bodies -- all of them him. The discovery unravels everything Laz thought he understood about his ability: the side-stepping was never just a private gift, and the worlds he's been dipping into may be connected by something far more deliberate, and far more dangerous, than he realized.

Card, a longtime writer of gifted-child protagonists forced to grow up fast under institutional pressure, uses the side-stepping premise to ask what a self even is once it's been duplicated hundreds of times over -- and what a teenager owes to versions of himself he's manipulated without their consent. Reawakening pushes Laz further, forcing him to reckon with the damage his interference has already done to the fragile, overlapping realities he's been sliding between, as the people and forces behind the cloning facility close in. A third volume is planned to complete the trilogy, though Simon & Schuster has not yet announced a title or release date.

How to read this series

Read in publication order: Wakers, then Reawakening. This is a continuous, tightly serialized story rather than a set of standalone entries -- each book picks up directly from where the last left off, following Laz's escalating understanding of what side-stepping actually is, who built the cloning facility he wakes up in, and what he owes the alternate-world versions of himself he has been quietly steering. A third and concluding volume is planned but has not yet been announced with a title or date, so newcomers are, for now, reading an unfinished trilogy rather than a complete series.