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 all 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.

The personality of each narrator shows through in the telling of each book, and Jalil proves himself an able narrator whose analytical approach to narration helps to explain how events in Everworld may be related to one another. The shifting of narrators allows Everworld to be described through David's love of action and interest in logistics in Search for Senna, through...