by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves
ages: 11+ (It’s actually upper MG)
First sentence: “Once I got lost in my own house.”
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Review copy is a publisher complimentary copy for my bookstore 6-8th grade book group.

Joey Harker is pretty much your average every-day boring tenth grader. Nothing special. Until one day, he’s out on a field trip with his social studies class (quick aside: no 10th grader has social studies, do they??), and he finds himself in a different… world. Fighting for his life, though he has no idea what was going on.

It’s a desperate fight, and the man sent to find Joey — Jay– doesn’t fare well. However, he does explain a couple of things: the Earth is only one of millions of possible earths, all along a continuum that spans from highly scientific to highly magical. There are two entities — HEX and the Binary who are vying for domination and control of all the earths. Joey, and all the alternate versions of himself, have banded together to form Interworld: they walk between worlds and attempt to stop the nefarious powers from universe domination.

I picked this one for the book group partially because I thought the idea had merit. And I wanted to attract some boys to the group. I don’t know if the second one worked (yet), but the first one, well… let’s just say the idea was a good one. But something was lost in the execution: I didn’t connect with Joey, or I didn’t really care about the fate of the worlds. And the bad guys — HEX– were kind of laughable caricatures. And definitely posers. I didn’t care for the Old Man — the head of Interworld — and his arbitrary methods with Joey (that whole memory-erasing bit didn’t make much sense). And aside from the creative variations of  “Joey”, I didn’t particularly like Joey’s team.

And the lesson learned here? A good idea does not a good book make.