With a devious older sister who wishes he hadn't been born, eleven-year-old Chris needs some heavenly intervention. But when that help arrives in the form of a boltzmon – the all-knowing, shape-shifting remnant of a black hole – Chris is in even bigger trouble.
In this clever sci-fi twist on the genie tales of folklore, a young boy suddenly has access to more power than he can handle. The highly unstable boltzmon flips Chris at random to different worlds, including one of his own imagining. It is in Arteria, a country he has mapped out on his computer, that Chris has the chance to confront his sister, Lulu, and end their rivalry before it has deadly consequences.
A villainous older sister, a quantum physics genie with a weird sense of humor, and a sharp young hero – this Bermuda triangle of characters is at the center of a funny, frightening novel in the spirit of William Sleator's masterwork, Interstellar Pig.
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William Warner Sleator III (1945–2011), known as William Sleator, was an American science fiction author who wrote primarily young adult novels but also wrote for younger readers. His books typically deal with adolescents coming across a peculiar phenomenon related to an element of theoretical science, then trying to deal with the situation. The theme of family relationships, especially between siblings, is frequently intertwined with the science fiction plotline.
Due to the suspenseful and often eerie nature of some of his works, Sleator has been compared to young-adult horror writer R. L. Stine. Others cite a strong resemblance to the paranoid, dream-like style of Franz Kafka, which is most notable in House of Stairs, one of Sleator's most powerful novels.
Links
William Sleator. Wikipedia.