Best of All Worlds
By Kenneth Oppel
Penguin Teen Canada
Age 12 and older
Thirteen-year-old Xavier Oak, a gamer and avid fan of Dungeons & Dragons (and the narrator of Kenneth Oppel’s new book), had reluctantly agreed to spend the weekend at the family’s lakeside cottage with his father, Caleb, and pregnant stepmother, Nia. Older brother Sam had a soccer game and stayed home with their mother. But when Xavier woke up that first morning at the cottage, his life changed dramatically — and apparently forever.
He heard a goat bleating, and when he looked out the window he saw that the lake was gone and the cottage was now on farmland. What’s more, when he and his father explored the property, they eventually discovered that other than two goats, 15 chickens and some ducks, they were the only signs of life under a seemingly impenetrable dome. Xavier concludes they’ve been abducted by aliens, and that the biodome, with a diameter of about 10 kilometres and a circumference of 32 kilometres, is somewhere in outer space.
What follows is a riveting account of three people making a life for themselves away from everything they have ever known, joined within days by an infant who has never known anything else. When, 41 pages into this book, I discovered they’d been living this way for three years — and become proficient farmers in the process — I was shocked, and Xavier’s longing for his mother and his brother Sam became especially poignant.
By now they had seven goats in addition to the chickens, and three-year-old Noah found a puppy in the orchard. Xavier knows their unidentified abductors — simply referred to as “they” throughout the book — have a soft spot for Noah, occasionally leaving him gifts. He was the result of a difficult birth and “they” knocked the family out, saved the baby, and even changed the bloody sheets. Xavier, meanwhile, feels more and more like an outsider as he misses his mother and older brother; when his phone dies, he feels especially devastated, since he has spent three years texting his brother (albeit without service). “All my music and pictures, all my one-way conversations with Sam, gone forever,” he tells us.
When Xavier stumbles onto a site apparently intended for another dwelling, and watches a horde of “glittering midges” construct a two-storey lodge that turns out to belong to a family with two daughters — one a 16-year-old, the other about four — this already fantastic story takes even more incredible twists and turns, with issues that will strike readers as surprisingly timely and current.
A blurb on the back cover has author David Levithan calling this book a masterpiece, adding: “As soon as you finish, you’ll want to talk to someone about it.” That was certainly the case for me, although the first thing I did was reread the whole book in hopes of finding answers to the questions I still had about this well-crafted story — one that kept me guessing right to the end.
