The King in the Window (by Adam Gopnik)

Aided by his skateboarding American friend, Charlie, Mrs. Pearson, a snippy but wise (well, actually witty) old British woman, and Neige, a French girl who is a crystalomancer, Oliver enters the Way, the reverse world of mirrors. There he meets Nostradamus, and discovers that the Master steals souls and intends to control all of the multiverse revealed by quantum physics. He commands an army of soul-stealers, while Charlie has only his friends, his brains, the Wraiths, a group of terrified children, and a pack of skating teens.

With this wild tale author Adam Gopnik has fallen prey to the curse of first-time children's authors: trying to cram everything into his first book. He tosses out ideas and images with reckless abandon, a surfeit of riches that quickly becomes too much. Page after page of less-than-lucid exposition goes by, along with a plethora of references only adults will get, including Yoko's effect on the Beatles, Robert Parker's wine commentary, Moliere's sense of irony, cinema clichés, and much more.

Gopnik seems to have heard the dictum that great children's literature appeals to adults too, but mixed it up with family movies, in which adult references are thrown in to keep the accompanying adults from boredom. The result is a book that will satisfy neither. It shimmers with imagination and beautiful prose, an intellectual feast, but the editor did not do him a service by withholding the red pen.