Interworld
by Neil Gaiman and
Michael Reaves
★★☆
I tend to love most of
what Gaiman writes, but this one fell a bit flat for me. The concept is
fascinating, but the execution was a bit off. The adventure story follows
Joseph, a normal boy who walks straight into another world.
He discovers and entire
army of different versions of himself from other worlds. There’s Jerzy: from a world
with feathers where women lay eggs, Josef: who is really strong, Jai: who
meditates and has a huge vocabulary, Jakon: a wolf girl, Jo: a girl with wings,
and J’r’ohoho: a centaur.
The army trains at a
boot camp run by the “old man”. Their goal is to, “Protect the Altiverse and stem the tides of magic
and science.” That’s a heavy order for the newly inducted Joseph to wrap his
head around.
There are two different
groups of bad guys. The Binary, who travel on gravitons, freeze the walkers to
use them to fuel their ships. Then there are the HEX folk. They use magic to boil
walkers and use their souls to power interplane travel. Both sets of villains
were a bit cartoonish. In a lot of ways, this novel reminded me of the Percy
Jackson series.
BOTTOM LINE: At times
there was just too much going on at once. We bounced back and forth so quickly
that it was hard to feel attached to the characters. Apparently it started out
as an idea for a TV show and I was left wondering if that might have been a
better fit for this particular story. I do think this might be a perfect fit
for teenage boys.
"I wanted to spare her
what I knew: that reality can splinter like a hammered mirror. That it can
happen to anybody."
"Sometimes war is
necessary to teach us the value of peace."
No comments:
Post a Comment