by Ransom Riggs ★★★☆☆
Sunderworld, Vol. I: The Extraordinary Disappointments of Leopold Berry by Ransom Riggs wins the award in a couple of different categories for me. It easily wins "Longest Title" of any book I read this year. Ransom Riggs wins "Coolest Author Name" in a landslide—nicely done, Ransom's parents! It may win "Series with the Most Potential"...but as a stand-alone novel, it doesn't quite measure up. I'll explain why.
Leopold "Larry" Berry is on the brink of graduating from high school, and he's searching for a plan. He certainly doesn't know what he wants to be when he grows up, but he knows plenty of things he doesn't want to be, and most of those undesirable paths are exactly the direction his hard-charging father wants him to take. The novel opens with Leopold effectively failing an interview with a career coach, inciting his father's anger, and Leopold drifting even further into his untethered malaise.
There are a few bright spots in Leopold's life. One is his best friend Emmet Worthington, a fellow nerd who has been by Leopold's side for most of their childhood. Another is an old show called "Max's Adventures in Sunderworld". After his mother's death six years prior—an event that still emotionally impacts Leopold on a daily basis—Leopold found a collection of old VHS tapes with the entire first (and only) season of the show among her belongings. The show was "kind of campy and cheap-looking: wooden acting, flimsy sets, cinematography that sometimes wasn't even in focus." It follows the adventures of a boy named Max, who discovers an alternate Los Angeles universe—Sunderworld—where the citizens of Sunder are in a neverending battle against Noxum, "monstrous invaders from the Ninth Realm".
Leopold and Emmet spend countless hours watching and recreating scenes from Sunderworld, immersing themselves in every episode in its lone season dozens of times, and it was the main thing that got Leopold through the bleakest moments following his mother's death. Leopold also started "Seeing into Sunder", as he puts it, which involved him randomly seeing creatures from the show in everyday L.A. He assumed it was "some kind of waking dream". A therapist told him "that he saw strange and impossible things at the moments he most wanted to escape from his life" and wrote it off to a "hyperactive imagination", but the episodes continued to happen. In the show, similar visions happened to Max, and Leopold assumed—fantasized, even—that he might be on the same trajectory as fictional Max. But after numerous years of dashed hopes, Leopold has effectively resigned himself to the fact that Sunderworld is not real. Until, that is, it all starts to become very real.
I mentioned the series has a lot of potential, but the stand-alone novel fell short, and there are a few reasons for that. It's a slow burn-in, which is understandable—there's a lot of setup required when building a backstory, characters, and a complete world. I'd have no problem with the slow burn-in if the rest of the story really took off. And it started to...until it abruptly stopped. It was as if Riggs said "I'm going to write several volumes of this thing, and the first one is not going to exceed 327 pages". When first books in a series succeed for me, they establish the characters and the story, and have a fully self-contained story arc while still having more to tell. There is no fully contained story arc in this one, no significant climax, and that was my biggest beef with it.
So, I finished it frustrated. I think the series has plenty of potential—the groundwork is established, Leopold and Emmet are compelling characters, and there are numerous unanswered questions and mysteries to be revealed. It definitely has a little bit of a similar vibe to the movie Galaxy Quest—highly underrated if you haven't seen it—in that we have a collection of characters who are experts in an assumed-to-be fictional series that turns out to be real and in which they suddenly find themselves. I will likely be reading Volume II, but if you're considering starting this one, I'd wait until you can read Volume I and Volume II together to avoid that same frustration. It's a series with high-4-star potential, but the first book felt incomplete.
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