Fantastic voice work on this one. I work as an English teacher in Japan, and often when I switch between giving a few clarifications in Japanese and then switching back into English, I find myself speaking Japanese with a terrible American English accent, and then switching back to American English with a Japanese accent. Here, the narrator switches accents from American to Australian to African and back to American in a few seconds flawlessly. That's some pretty amazing stuff.
Unless I missed something, it's interesting that nothing in the story suggested that the protagonist or her husband were Australian. Maybe it was the whim of the narrator? Anyway, it worked and I'm not complaining.
I liked the story, too. I'm reading The Long Earth series by Stephen Baxter and Terry Prachett, and this story seems like it could be part of the same setting. The rules of trans-dimensional travel seem completely the same. But where
did that tribe go when they vanished from our own universe? And if they could take anything they were holding when they traveled, could they take
someone with them as well?
The photograph descriptions made the scene visual as if my eye's neurons were firing off and showing me the look of each scene. Is it really much difference from a scene's description, by calling them out as photos? For me, yes, as it created a separation of action and voice from scene. The story made a dual impression, which the final photo could exploit in summing up the story and Yona's struggle.
I completely agree. Telling the story from photographs, both real and imagined, was a really bold and experimental narrative choice, and it was very well-done here. All-around, a very nice story and an excellent production.