Best of All Worlds

LoveReading Says

Xavier Oak is a thirteen-year-old who’d rather be doing anything besides embarking on a summer trip with his father and pregnant stepmother. He’d much rather stay home with his brother and mother or play Dungeons and Dragons with Selena, the coolest girl around. Despite all of this, Xavier resigns himself to his fate and goes on the trip to the cottage by the lake.

The problem? When he wakes up on his second day at the cottage, the lake is…gone.

It’s like the cottage itself has been plucked from the ground by a giant and put somewhere else.

On the verge of panic, Xavier, his dad and stepmother go exploring in a desperate attempt to figure out what has happened.

They discover two things:

They are trapped inside some sort of dome.

They are completely on their own.

Although they appear to have enough supplies at hand to maintain their survival, a whirlwind of questions pummel their minds. Where are they? Who brought them here? How do they escape?

Three years pass before anything happens. Three years of routine and fading hope.

Then, out of the blue, another family enters the dome and everything changes.

The two groups discover they have nothing in common. In fact, they don’t see eye-to-eye on anything, including the theories as to how they arrived in the dome.

What follows is a tense exploration of the power of disinformation, conspiracy theories, captivity, climate change and control.

The Best of All Worlds is fast-paced and engaging, a thought-provoking look at larger, Us vs.Them rhetoric while still focusing on captivity’s impact on the individuals within the dome. I really enjoyed Oppel’s deep-dive into current social divides and the long lasting impact it has on our collective psyche.

It’s a genre-twisting survivalist sci-fi thriller built for fans of books like Unwind by Neal Shusterman, Gone by Michael Grant and The Giver by Lois Lowry.

Lucas Maxwell

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