Oh, I’m so sorry to have to give this book a negative rating.  Usually I am a fan of Gary Schmidt’s books, and I was really looking forward to reading this one, but I had to slug my way through it, and I don’t imagine many of my students would stick with it much beyond the first chapter.  I think maybe Sci-Fi/Fantasy is not Gary’s strong suit.  The story is told in alternating chapters, with part of the story told on another planet in turmoil, and part in contemporary New England, with a family in a bit of turmoil themselves.  With the Valorim facing their impending doom, in a last ditch to preserve all the good and beauty of their world, a locket is fashioned that contains all their arts, and launched out into the universe; when it lands in Tommy Pepper’s lunch box, it begins to exude its influence over him, so that he finds himself suddenly able to do all sorts of things he never could before. Tommy’s story is actually pretty good, but the ending isn’t really satisfactory enough to make it worth slugging through all the other chapters to get there: the chapters set in Weoruld Ethelim are so heavily riddled with invented vocabulary unique to this planet, without enough supporting English text to give them meaning through context, that the reader is left puzzled and these chapters become a chore to read as one must struggle to make meaning of them. There is a glossary in the back, but few students are going to willingly look up so many unfamiliar words, and besides, doing so interrupts the flow of the story (not that there’s much flow in these chapters).  The five-finger rule tells kids if they run into five words on the first page that give them trouble, that book might be too hard for them.  I ran into five such words in the first two sentences.