Applegate likes to experiment, and her novels tend to be lively exercises in ideas and techniques. In the case of Everworld, she creates a place where the world's ancient mythologies coexist, and she has fun creating adventures that involve mixing the mythologies. For the "Everworld" series, she creates four adventurers who are snatched from fairly ordinary teenaged American lives, although Jalil's psychological problems are somewhat out of the ordinary. Through these characters she experiments with techniques of narration by having each one narrate novels: first David for Search for Senna, then Christopher for Land of Loss, then April for Enter the Enchanted, then Jalil for Realm of the Reaper, and the cycle is repeated through the subsequent novels.

This can be disconcerting. David is a very engaging narrator, and losing his storytelling voice for Land of Loss is disappointing, although Christopher manages to make Land of...