The Game of Sunken Places

#236
Title: The Game of Sunken Places
Author: M. T. Anderson
Publisher: Scholastic
Year: 2005
302 pages

High school friends engage in a quest that recalls Jumanji fused to Ender's Game. Within Anderson's oeuvre, it falls between the M. T. Anderson's Thrilling Tales books and Feed in terms of whimsy and emotional realism. As in those books, absurdity intermingles with sudden moments of poignancy. The relationship between the boys was not as tense (or intense) as I would have liked for greater emotional and plot complexity and payoff. Anderson does better in the first person; his third-person stories tend toward an excess of awkward exposition.