Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children series author Ransom Riggs (Hollow City) contemplates grief and selfhood in this idiosyncratic, surreal urban fantasy series opener.
Leopold's mother died from cancer shortly after he turned 12, so Leopold was forced to move in with his overbearing "success coach" father. Then the "dissociative episodes" started: he "began to see strange and impossible things" from "Sunder," a "fictional realm from a 1990s fantasy TV series... which had aired, and gone off the air, over a decade before Leopold was born." The "weird LA fantasy world" from the show captured his heart and entered his world, but counselors convinced Leopold that he was seeing phantoms as a way of handling grief. The visions stopped. Now, at 17, he is "Seeing into Sunder" again. Leopold's visions increase until he enters Sunder, an alternate Los Angeles whose residents are searching for someone to rescue them from magic shortages and monster attacks. Leopold could be that savior, but the residents won't simply take his word for it--he'll have to prove that he is more than "remarkably unremarkable."
Riggs's Sunderworld is a fantastical kaleidoscope of visuals, colorful language ("ghostly whorls of whitish vapor"), and immersive action grounded in a "perfectly average" reality. This love letter to Los Angeles is brimming with magic, nostalgia, and eclectic characters. Riggs, in addition to creating a wildly imaginative world, handles topics of grief and loss with aplomb, having Leopold mark his mother's death with his odometer rather than years: "7,261 miles ago felt closer. That was just a long plane trip." An intriguing and enigmatic first installment. --Lana Barnes, freelance reviewer and proofreader