Suzy McKee Charnas is better known for her adult fiction and non-fiction (she is the author of The Verbal Art of Self-Defense). I picked this book up for a buck and thought, what could I lose?

The better question may have been, for a buck, what could I gain? That’s not to say that this novel is bad. Charnas is too much of a professional to have written a bad book. And there are some little twists to the genre that she nicely pulls off. But, on the whole, it’s rather unimaginative.

The protagonist is a girl whose favorite aunt has just died, and she’s quite bummed about it. So when she finds herself slipping into another world from Central Park, she is skeptical–especially since the hero of this other world is Kevin Malone, a bully who used to pick on her.

As I said, not a bad book. There’s your typical walking skeletons, and the little people, and the quests. But there’s also a more gritty, personal nature to the protagonist. I’m not sure it is altogether successful, but it was at least interesting.