The Game of Sunken Places

Take equal parts of JUMANJI and A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS; add in trolls, elves, automatons, and lost civilizations; remove all humor; and you get something like M.T. Anderson's offbeat adventure. Two boys from Boston take a trip to Vermont to stay with Uncle Max. They arrive at the strange mansion to find a Victorian lifestyle and an old wooden game board that leads them to ceremonial mounds, strange creatures, and an ancient battle between warring kingdoms. The story is purposefully off-kilter, with Marc Cashman's dry, precise, and percussive style complementing Anderson's writing. Anderson and Cashman are both skilled at their crafts, overall, the result is an unsettling and unsatisfying challenge. S.E.S. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine