I liked Planesrunner, but I’m sceptical of its petnotial success as a YA novel in the US for a couple of reasons quite other than Phoebe’s entirely reasonable concern about Everett’s emotional connection to events.Everett’s London felt well-realized to me, but I’m an adult life-long Anglophile. I think there’s a serious risk that, for an American teenager, Everett’s current-day London would feel just as other-worldly as E3, E4, and all the other Es that we’re likely to see as the series unfolds, thus failing to provide an initial moment of familiarity that could act as a hook and a point of orientation. I’m very glad that the book has acquired a UK publisher, so that it can reach an audience unlikely to have this issue. (I don’t, btw, think that American youth are unable to appreciate a book set outside the US, if the setting is established and developed for a significant amount of the plot. It’s the right that’s normal and contemporary established; now for strange! snapshot that I think is likely to get a response of but that’s ALREADY strange!. My stepson adored Sliders, so maybe the concept alone will suffice to engage. (Can’t try this on him as a test audience, as he’s now in his late 20s too old to be the target audience and too young still, I think, to be willing to read things aimed at a young audience from a pinacle of adult security. Maybe next year.)I’ve begun to read YA books with male protagonists with half an eye to whether they’d appeal to my 12-year-old nephew. At the moment, he really prefers first person narrative. He hadn’t been making a connection with independent reading that lay outside graphic stories until someone (bless someone!) gave him a novel written in first-person. Scenes where Everett’s perspective is strongly conveyed (and they exist) might bridge this gap, but there are plenty of scenes where Everett’s perspective feels more like a convenient camera location than an integrated and responding component of the story.The one thing that bothered me personally was that Everett seemed to notice details of female characters’ appearance equivalently, whether they were adults or girls his own age. I have never known a boy in his early teens who paid the slightest attention to an adult woman’s shoes or makeup, unless he had a frantic crush on her. McDonald bleeding through his viewpoint character a little here, I think, in aid of getting the description right. I’d have found those details less jarring if they’d come second-hand from Sen or the Captain: She’s a bully, but her shoes are killer. Huh? I have no problem at all with his hyper-competence. (The cooking comes specifically from cuisine nights with Dad. The mathematician-goalkeeper-planesrunner abilities are his core identity.) If he ever turns out to be a master gardener and quiltmaker, suddenly because those abilities are required by the plot, then I’ll complain.