a night with "Dormia"

Last night at the Brookline Booksmith, Jake Halpern and Peter Kujawinski read from (and acted out) their new YA/all-ages novel Dormia. The book tells the story of another young boy (not THAT young boy) with special gifts and a hidden lineage that he gradually figures out on a world-girdling quest.

Twelve-year-old Alfonso Perplexon has a sleepwalking problem -- sometimes he wakes up and find himself at the top of a tree or having accomplished some amazing feat. In his hometown of World’s End, Minnesota, the dad is out of the picture (a familiar theme in Star Wars, E.T., HP, and other boys-to-men coming of age stories).Alfonso and Mom carry on. Then a stranger comes to town, a quirky man who claims to be Alfonso’s long lost uncle. The man tells of the kingdom of Dormia, far in the Ural Mountains, and that Alfonso has the gift of "wakeful sleeping." This lost land is in trouble, and only Alfonso has a chance to save it. So out the door they go, headed for adventure, picking up oddball characters and mishaps along the way.

At the reading, Halpern did a masterful job play-acting some key scenes from the book, and Kujawinski deadpanned the tale of how this team of authors managed to write the book from the distance of New York, Paris, Israel and a Navajo Reservation in northwestern New Mexico. Their story inspired me to try my hand at spinning my own tale, or perhaps collaborating with my pal JP (the dude who taught me D&D; you can read about that in Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks.)

And the funny thing is, there's a 12 year old boy gamer named Alex who I talk to in my book. And I was 12 when I began to play D&D. What's the attraction to age 12 and all this fantasy stuff?

No longer 12 years old: Ethan Gilsdorf and Jake Halpern show off their books