I very much enjoyed John C. Wright’s wildly creative – and wildly fun – fantasy novel, Somewhither, which I reviewed a while back. There we met one of the strangest heroes in fiction – teenaged boy Ilya Muromets, who always knew he was adopted – after all, he looks like a Neanderthal, while the rest of his family is slender and blond. What he has learned since is that he is actually an alien from another universe, and pretty much invulnerable. If he gets wounded – even beheaded – his body just reassembles itself. So one day when he saw the girl he had a crush on – scientist’s daughter “Penny” Dreadful – pulled through an interdimensional portal into an alternate reality, he did what came naturally. He followed her, wearing a bathrobe and carrying his grandfather’s katana sword. After all, he’d always wanted to be a hero. Then followed the bizarre adventures of that book.

At the beginning of Nowhither, the second book in the series, Ilya finds himself trapped in a sort of interdimensional transit station, besieged by evil wizards who are slowly breaking down his own wizard’s defense spells. With him are some friends he’s made plus 150 pretty slave girls he’s rescued, all of whom look to him as a leader for some reason. At last he and his friends work out an escape plan, and they manage to escape to Penny’s home planet – an undersea world peopled entirely by something like mermaids. Here Ilya will be reunited with part of his family, and learn some hard truths about himself and the consequences of his actions.

Nowhither is an unabashedly Christian novel – though the Christianity is emphatically Roman Catholic, which will probably bother some Protestant readers. The theological implications all through are complex, and I generally didn’t bother worrying about them. The book is fun, and I wish I could say it was as fun as Somewhither was. But in fact I have some reservations.

One is complexity. Author Wright has created a richly imaginative world, full of characters, nationalities, religions, and even universes – all anchored in the Book of Genesis. But a by-product of that fecundity of invention is that lots of exposition is required. It seemed to me that about half of Nowhither consisted of people explaining stuff. There was some action, but a lot less than in the last book.

The second problem is one I hesitate to name, but can’t avoid. Nowhither is a very sexy book. Young Ilya gets subjected to a level of sexual temptation that’s hard to describe. His (successful) efforts to keep his chastity are admirable, exemplary, violent, and biblical. But lots and lots of time is spent describing the sensual delights of “the drowned world.” (The “mermaid” on the cover is dressed much more modestly than the ones in the book.) I fear that, for teenaged male readers, that may have… unintended results. This much “skin” in a book will not, I fear, contribute much to the Gross National Continence.

Maybe I’m just a prude.

Anyway, I do recommend Nowhither, but mainly so you can keep up with the series and be ready for the next book. And for the jokes, because it’s pretty funny.