A middle-grade novel about grief, physics, and the limits of getting what you want, and a genuine delight on the sentence level. Sal Vidon is thirteen, diabetic, an accomplished sleight-of-hand magician, and able to reach into adjacent universes and pull things through, a talent he mostly uses to produce raw chickens in other people's lockers. What he also uses it for is more painful: retrieving versions of his mother, who died years ago in this universe but is alive in others. Sal's father, a calamity physicist, understands exactly what his son is doing and how dangerous it is, because every hole Sal opens weakens the membrane between worlds. Into this comes Gabi Real, the ferociously competent editor of the school paper, who catches Sal out in the first chapter and becomes the friend who can actually hold him accountable. Carlos Hernandez sets the story at a Miami arts school and writes with a Cuban American texture that is specific rather than decorative, from the food to the code-switching to the sprawling improvised family that assembles around a sick infant in the hospital. The science-fiction premise carries real emotional weight, since the book is finally about whether Sal can accept a loss he has the power to keep undoing. Winner of the Pura Belpre Award, published under Rick Riordan Presents, it is funny, warm, and unexpectedly wise about mourning.