Teenagers Seth and Kendra are dropped off by traveling parents at their grandfather’s isolated Connecticut estate, and soon discover why he’s so reluctant to have them-the place is a secret haven for magical creatures, both benign and decidedly otherwise. Witty repartee between the central characters, as well as the occasional well-done set piece, isn’t enough to hold this hefty debut together. Meanwhile, those looking for a touch of the familiar will find it in Sunny's biggest victories, which are entirely non-magical (the detailed dynamism of Sunny's soccer match is more thrilling than her magical world saving). Though Sunny's initiative is thin-she is pushed into most of her choices by her friends and by Leopard adults-the worldbuilding for Leopard society is stellar, packed with details that will enthrall readers bored with the same old magical worlds. Now she spends the day in mundane Lamb school and sneaks out at night to learn magic with her cadre of Leopard friends: a handsome American bad boy, an arrogant girl who is Orlu’s childhood friend and Orlu himself. Sunny, it seems, is a Leopard person, one of the magical folk who live in a world mostly populated by ignorant Lambs. When a boy in her class, Orlu, rescues her from a beating, Sunny is drawn in to a magical world she's never known existed. She can't play soccer with the boys because, as she says, 'being albino made the sun my enemy,' and she has only enemies at school. Who can't love a story about a Nigerian-American 12-year-old with albinism who discovers latent magical abilities and saves the world? Sunny lives in Nigeria after spending the first nine years of her life in New York.

Readers too will be unmoved, and will likely prefer such shorter versions as the one by Paule Du Bouchet with Fabian Negrin’s otherworldly illustrations (2004), or Charles Mikolaycak’s sensual rendition (1992). But the human figures are sketchier than the immortal ones, and unlike his listeners, Orpheus seems oddly unmoved by his music.

Written in formal cadences-“The thought of poetry was so much long-cold ash to him, and the memory of song was bitter”-and divided into numerous short chapters, the tale includes encounters with Charon and Cerberus, the enigmatic Pluto (he goes by both Greek and Roman names here) and a strangely content Sisyphus.

Freely changing details, he opens with the great musician’s rescue of a baby girl left out on a hillside to perish, closes not with Orpheus’s violent death, but a soul-restoring discovery that Princess Eurydice is not entirely lost to him, and in between, takes him from the giddy heights of romance to Hades’s sunless realm. Cadnum follows up Starfall: Phaeton and the Chariot of the Sun (2004) with another myth inspired by Ovid’s version, but woodenly recast as a novel.

Starfall by Michael Cadnum