A Completely Different Place

When Johnny Nesbit wakes up in a pink bedroom that is inside a glass bottle, he soon realizes that he is battling the Strangers, the fairies that had stolen his baby sister Cheryl a year earlier.

Grade 5-9. The hero of The Same Place But Different (S & S, 1995) returns for another adventure involving "the Strangers," magical fairies who sometimes meddle in our world. Here, Johnny Nesbit wakes up to discover that he has been shrunk, placed in a bottle, and transported, without any clothes, to a miniature house. There he meets Cheryl, a former classmate who had disappeared a couple months earlier. She explains that they are in the home of a kind "Master" who takes care of many children. Johnny correctly suspects that the man must be an evil Stranger, that the children have all been kidnapped for some sinister purpose, and that Cheryl is under a spell. The two teens unravel the truth and concoct plans to escape and save the children. As in his first adventure, Johnny narrates the tale with a lively, mildly amusing sarcastic tone. While he's properly amazed to be trapped in a bottle, he's also embarrassed to have to be wrapped in a pink ruffled blanket. Though rarely hilarious, the humorous tone continues throughout without detracting from the suspense that develops. Johnny does a fairly smooth job of explaining the major events of his previous encounter with Strangers. As the plot progresses, however, several characters from the first book reappear, and readers who haven't read it will miss out on some of the impact. Many of the magical elements are based on European folklore, as the author explains in a historical note, and the combination of traditional magic with unconventional heroes will appeal to many readers.?Steven Engelfried, West Linn Public Library, OR
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Wiseguy Winnipegian Johnny Nesbit is again trapped in the Strangers' green-skied land in this thin but occasionally raunchy sequel to The Same Place but Different (1995). Cheryl Zennor, a lonely orphan who has been kidnapped by scheming Thomas Rhymer to take care of dozens of unwanted children who are being gradually transformed into flying dogs, unwittingly summons her favorite classmate with a magic device. Snatched from his bed, Johnny wakes up naked and bug-sized, looking at Cheryl's relatively huge eyeball. Understandably, it takes him a while to get his bearings, but, drawing on experiences in his previous adventure, he's soon casting about for ways to rescue himself, the children, and Cheryl--to whom he quickly becomes attached. The job gets done, but only after a long ramble about Rhymer's estate, punctuated by occasional slapstick set pieces involving careless magic, clothes or a sudden lack thereof, Johnny's encounter with a mammoth pizza, and the like. Nodelman ably exploits the comic possibilities of being tiny in a Brobdingnagian world, but the plot wanders aimlessly and relies so heavily on characters and incidents from the previous book that frequent pauses for backfilling are mandatory. The farcical bits and Johnny's sarcasm may appeal to some readers, but this weak outing is better in its parts than its sum. (Fiction. 10-13) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Gr. 5^-8. In The Same Place but Different (1995), Johnny Nesbit must rescue his baby sister, Andrea, from the Strangers, or fairies, who have put a changeling in her place. Now Johnny wakes from a nightmare to find himself back in the Strangers' land, but with an important difference. He has shrunk to Barbie-doll size: "Yeah, I'd actually turned into a miniature action figure, a cute little dolly-wolly." Nodelman deftly mixes folklore, magic spells, and a sharp eye for modern-day irony with a huge serving of sardonic humor to create a crackling yarn of a boy from Winnipeg who must undergo humiliation and danger to rescue himself, his classmate Cheryl (who brought him there), and the human children who are being transformed into green-skinned Strangers. Although the stand-alone sequel is missing some of the genuine creepiness of the first book, it offers a romance with true tenderness and no syrup. Susan Dove Lempke