FINISHED:
Archer, E. (2011). Geek fantasy novel. New York: Scholastic.

[[Reviewed from ARC.] Ralph is an American tech-geek hired by his aunt and uncle to come to their aging British castle to, ostensibly, help them set up a wireless network. Upon his arrival, Ralph meets his three cousins and another aunt, Aunt Chessie, whom the rest of the family has seemed to ostracize. Ralph eventually comes to understand that his mother and her sisters are fairy godmothers of a sort, imbued with the ability to grant each child one wish. However, after a mishap with Chessie’s son many years earlier, the women have sworn off that part of their nature. Naturally, each of Ralph’s cousins ends up making a wish which Aunt Chessie is only too happy to grant, and which ends up transporting each of them to an alternate reality. One cousin’s wish involves mobilizing a bunch of fairies to rebel against their oppressors, another is a riff off Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”, and in the last Ralph must travel to purgatory and the underworld. Archer (actually author Elliot Schrefer) has written a novel for which the title is perfectly apt: the author has thrown in every fantasy creature, setting, and convention imaginable and, thus, comes across as just too ambitious. By the time you get to Ralph finding a teddy bear with a mirror in its paw which he then wraps around his head in order to view a wintery “otherworld”, you know that Archer has gone overboard. A bit of redemption comes toward the end of the novel when the narrator begins to cross the line and starts to interact with the characters, setting up a plot twist that will likely surprise most readers, and turning the novel into a meta-fictional whirlwind with a rather unconventional denouement. Rather bloated, unfocused and confounding, though, Archer’s novel, even with its exploding bunny rabbits, is just overdone.]

STARTED:
Yee, Lisa. (2011). Warp speed. New York: Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic.

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