Kristen Alvanson

Wild 'n' crazy novel in which a couple of MIT geniuses invent a way to teleport people by means of a magic bracelet and some GPS jiggery-pokery. The beta test involves offering a bunch of Americans and Iranians the chance to spend three hours in each other's countries being looked after by a volunteer host, but while some of the swaps go to plan and result in the kind of cross-cultural learnings you'd expect, the tech is glitchy and starts opening up cracks in reality and spacetime. So you show more have glorious vignettes like the one narrated by a scorpion who's adopted by a colony of Sasquatch, or the Lovecraftian one, or the two appearances of the marvelous, mean and beautiful Persian demon called the deav (daeva). Or the mysterious pre-Iranian Lullubi who bake bread in a magical kingdom of their own in the mountains.

What's great about this book is that all the flights of fantasy just about cohere into a story. That, and the cross-cultural stuff steers just clear of children's bookish worthiness with moments of menace and comedy. Generally I don't like the term "experimental" applied to literature but I think it's apt here - an ambitious and sometimes dazzling production. show less