REALMS THEREUNDER

Ross Lawhead's debut novel is a post-Narnia epic, with young protagonists traveling to an alternate universe that mimics our own. In their youth, Daniel and Freya encounter monsters and heroes; in the present, Daniel still fights while Freya tries to concentrate on her studies. Set in England, the story has many characters who have a wide range of accents, and Gary Dikeos slips easily from British to Scots to American ones for the narration. He has four voices for the two leads—one young and one adult for each—and they are distinctive enough to make the random changes in timeframe easier to follow. Dikeos's enthusiasm allows each new character to stand alone, and his reading of Swidgar the Knight is suitably bombastic for the parallel pseudo-medieval world. A.Z.W. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine [Published: NOVEMBER 2011]