Before Tomorrowland

Gr 5–8—In 1939, 17-year-old Lee Brackett accompanies his mother, Clara, to New York City. She wants to experience the World's Fair, and he wants to see Lou Gehrig play his final game before retirement. Clara, who is in the final stages of cancer, brings along a costume to better to blend in with the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers wannabes at the World Science Fiction Convention. When she's given a comic book and special glasses, reality starts to bend. Chapter narrations move among various characters: Lee and Clara; members of Plus Ultra (such as Amelia Earhart, Albert Einstein, and Orson Welles); and pro-Nazis and their weaponized robots. Lee and Clara encounter physicists, pacifists, robots, humans with computerized brains, Hitler's henchmen, and an invisible Zeppelin, while occasionally traveling through space and time. Fans of superhero comics and blockbusters will easily imagine the action scenes. Occasional black-and-white illustrations accompany the text and a four-color comic book is bound at the back. In a twist on the "book into movie" model, this prequel feels like a preemptive "movie into book" spin-off from Disney's Tomorrowland movie, due out in May 2015.