The Crossed Keys Chronicle

Homebound

Homebound

Even though we arenā€™t quite halfway through 2026, it has already been a great year for debut novelists. Two of my five star book ratings Iā€™ve had this year have been from authors' first efforts, one of them is The Franchise, and the other is the subject of this review Homebound by Portia Elan.

Homebound is a deeply ambitious novel for a first outing. The story takes place across three different timelines, inside of a narrative video game playthrough and a multi-year chain of emails between robotic researchers. In recent reviews Iā€™ve decried the use of parallel timelines as a novel trope that Iā€™d like to see less use of, but despite this book having so many distinct timelines and settings, I think everything here was vital to the story being told.

The novel begins in 1983 Cincinnati following a young woman named Rebecca. We soon learn that her uncle whom she was very close to has just recently died. During some visits to her grandmotherā€™s home, she finds some of the belongings left behind by her uncle which led her to find a partially completed text-adventure video game he created for her. The seed of that video gameā€™s story is what echoes across all the other timelines we go through in the book.

Iā€™m personally a big fan of the indie video game subculture that prizes story over impressive graphics. Iā€™m a big believer that video games and specifically more narrative or narrative-driven games can tell stories in ways that other kinds of fiction canā€™t always do. While you donā€™t get to actually play the game shown in the book, there are long passages of a play-through of it in the far future and I found the narrative to be really effective. The plot of the game shows up again and again in different forms in the far future, long after the collapse of most of civilization, having grown into almost an Arthurian level of myth.

Even though the story weaves between the different timelines, the real strength of the novel is its characters. Between Rebecca in our near present day, Yesiko in the far future, and a sentient Aye named Chaya who shows up for hundreds of years, all of them are fully realized even with the limited time you get to spend with them.

Homebound beyond just being one of my favorite books of the year so far, is one that I can see myself re-reading in the future as well. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a great sci-fi read this summer.