Featured Company:

InterWorld

Today's shopping tips: "Be wise in purchasing ..... find best value one"

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Manufacturer: Eos
List Price: $16.99
Our Price: $6.50
You Save: $ 10.49 ( 62% )
(prices subject to change)
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Average Ratings:

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 makes the only possible choice: to join an army of his own, an army of versions of himself from different dimensions who all share his amazing power and who are all determined to fight to save the worlds.

Master storyteller Neil Gaiman and Emmy Award-winning science-fiction writer Michael Reaves team up to create a dazzling tale of magic, science, honor, and the destiny of one very special boy—and all the others like him.

DESCRIPTION:

Binding: Hardcover
Format: Bargain Price
Label: Eos
Manufacturer: Eos
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: 2007-07-01
Publisher: Eos
Reading Level: Ages 9-12
Release Date: 2007-06-26
Studio: Eos


SIMILAR ITEMS:

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CUSTOMER REVIEWS:

Customer Rating:
Summary: Binding Problem/Good Content
Comment: The binding in this book is bent, so every page is "cupped." It is unlikely to hold up with multiple uses.

Since I personally purchased this book to include in my junior high classroom library, good binding is important and I am disappointed.

The content of the book lives up to its bestseller tag.



Customer Rating:
Summary: Great potential... but somehow fails to deliver
Comment: Technically, Neil Gaiman is a gifted writer.

When I read Stardust I got immersed in a magical and literarily flawless world: the feel of the novel, the richness of the plot and the technique convinced me that I was reading a masterpiece.

Now, with InterWorld the same feeling appeared: I felt like reading a plot created with a streak of genius.

However, this interesting, innovative and nicely constructed plot fails to deliver a consistent novel. Characters are shallow and some elements result definitely trite (not as far as in Eragon, but the clichès stick anyway).

As in most children's fiction, the Hero's Journey is carbon copied, but this time I felt that the plot could have given up to five hundred pages of adventure and character development. Gaiman and Reaves might have seen this novel as a step towards other projects, but their decision to convert the idea into a novel should have yielded better and deeper results.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Fun story, not entirely original...
Comment: I've become a recent fan of Neil Gaiman, starting with The Graveyard Book. Interworld was a fun book, and it kept my attention, but I can't help but compare it to a cross between Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber and Disney's animated movie Treasure Planet - with a little bit of StarGate SG1 thrown in. From a story telling point of view the first person narrative also smacked of Zelany's style in the Amber series.

Zelazny's Amber series is based on a family's ability to "Walk" between multiple, parallel, worlds - each only marginally different than the other - and that span a spectrum from one extreme to another. Zelazny's universe transitons from Order to Chaos, vs. Gaiman and Reaves' Binary to HEX. The notion of "walking" between these worlds in both universes is pretty coincidental too, however I'll agree that the mechanisms the characters employ to do so are different.

Disney's Treasure Planet - with it's space faring pirate ship and crew would not alone have been enough for me to make a comparison, but with both protagonists having an amorphous, floating, blob following them around it really clinched it for me.

Overall it's a fun book, and I would enjoy reading more chapters in the adventures of Joey Harker.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Fabulous Multidimensional Fun!
Comment: Okay. So I'm 56, and this is written for the pre-teen market. No matter: I had a rollicking good time reading this book! Joe Harker, last guy on any team to be picked, sets out on a classroom assignment and ends up taking on some of the more fascinating evildoers this side of the 12th dimension.

I'm not going to go into the plot, other than to say "Yes!" there are spaceships, pitched battles, liberal dollops of whiz-bang techno goodies, androids, and magic spells. And terror, suspense, grief, and triumph. But that's not why this is a good book.

The book is simply written well. The dialogues are snappy without being smart-alecky, the vocabulary is a pleasing challenge, the pace is quick, the narrative never seems to lose the thread, and the character development is more than adequate. But that's not why this is a good book.

The book sets itself apart from common as dirt sci-fi multi-dimensional space operas by reaching back to a classical definition of art: art should entertain, and inform. Most contemporary sci-fi is lucky to get the "entertain" part down, much less the "inform". Interworld includes lessons for the target audience (the fearless, and fear-inspiring, pre-teen segment of our population) regarding the nature of courage, loyalty, selflessness, family, the superiority of a team vs. the concept of the superhero. There is generosity, and true pathos, in this story. There is an exquisitely wrought mother/son scene. There are tears, both the hero's, and quite possibly, yours (I'll own up to it, I splashed a few pages). Which is why this is a good book!

Customer Rating:
Summary: Teen Titans save the Worlds
Comment: Make no mistake, I'm a keen Neil Gaiman fan - happily lapping up his children's books like 'M is For Magic' when I run out of his more adult works to read, but this novel failed to impress me, even with its cinematic leanings.

It starts promisingly enough, introducing us to a literal average Joe(y Harker) the kind of boy who gets lost in his own house. This provides quite a nice contrast to a power he wields which he discovers quite by accident when he wanders into the Interworld...

From that point on, the story degenerates into run-of-the-mill Hollywood sci-fi fare with a cast of predictable allies and villains who look like they were loaned off the set of 'Hellboy' or 'X-Men'.

The moralistic fable of a boy who learns to face up to his fears to answer a higher call to save his world and countless other worlds in the Altiverse together with versions of himself in these parallel dimensions should appeal to a young reader.

However to this overaged reader, lines like 'All I could think of was that scene from a hundred different horror movies, in which someone who's been possessed has a moment of sanity and pleads, "Kill Me!" ' give me the goosebumps, and not of the nice variety.

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