Book Review: "InterWorld" by Neil Gaiman & Michael Reaves

My Rating: 

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Plot Tease
Joey Harker isn't a hero. In fact, he's the kind of guy who gets lost in his own house. But then one day, Joey gets really lost. He walks straight out of his world and into another dimension.

Joey's walk between the worlds makes him prey to two terrible forces - armies of magic and science who will do anything to harness his power to travel between dimensions. When he sees the evil those forces are capable of, Joey joins an army of his own, versions of himself from different dimensions who all share his amazing power and who are determined to save worlds.

Book Review
InterWorld is a simple, adventurous book written by a well-known author. So I began to walk through Joey Harker's life, and then... I read the whole book in a few hours, straight through, out loud.

Gaiman is a masterful creator of wacky characters, worlds and jokes. InterWorld is no exception to this rule. There is a multidimensional life form (MDLF) that Joey meets during a walk between worlds that does not even speak, and yet "Hue" endeared himself to me very much. It communicates with colors and motions, all beautifully written and fully expressive. Hue demonstrates great courage and understanding without ever holding a conversation. By the end of the book it felt like a true friend, which was quite an authorial accomplishment.

Book Review: "The Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula Le Guin

(Series: Hainish Cycle)
My Rating: 

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Plot Tease
Genly Ai is an emissary from the human galaxy to Winter, a lost, stray world. His mission is to bring the planet back into the fold of an evolving galactic civilization, but to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own culture and prejudices and those that he encounters. On a planet where people are of no gender—or both—this is a broad gulf indeed...

Book Review
Left Hand of Darkness (LHoD) is now one of my favorite scifi books of the 20th century. It initially appears to be a typical encounter-the-aliens book, but you will be surprised. The characters are gripping, managing to blur stereotypical gender images in an amazingly realistic way.

The main character is Human,  but his contact throughout the novel is a Gethenian named Estraven. S/he is a layered personality with a poignant history: both of which reveal themselves over time. The reader is given pieces and clues, but denied the full picture until literally the last pages of the book and then it hits you like a ton of bricks. Estraven stole my heart. I want to cry and smile and ALL THE EMOTIONS.