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OLDER FICTION
Oppel, Kenneth

Best of All Worlds

256 pp. | Scholastic | June, 2025 | Trade ISBN 9781546158202 $19.99 | Ebook ISBN 9781546158219 $19.99
(2) YA One morning, Xavier Oak and his family wake up to find that their weekend lakeside cottage has been moved, with them in it, to a farm without explanation. They eventually determine that they’re trapped within a dome and surmise that they’ve been abducted by aliens. Three years pass, and their wariness of the situation has slowly given way to acceptance. Then another family arrives, including a possible love interest for the now-sixteen-year-old Xavier as well as a volatile, reactionary government-conspiracy-theorist father whose plans for escape threaten to upset the precarious balance the Oaks have attained. Questions—some voiced by the characters, others likely to occur to readers—add to the suspense and uncertainty. Why are they there? Where are they? Who are the captors who seem willing to provide for them? Is their original home, which is experiencing an escalated climate emergency, a future version of the Earth we know? Or is there a reason the Oaks have started following the example of little Noah, born just after they arrived, and calling it “Erf”? The novel doesn’t offer many conclusive answers, but amid the slowly building tension there’s plenty of room for intriguing speculation beyond the limited perspective that Xavier’s first-person narration provides.
Reviewer: Shoshana Flax | Horn Book Magazine Issue: May, 2025

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