Tanith Lee, born in England and married to fellow author and creator John Kaiine, has published such an incredible amount of books in her many years of publishing that sometimes it’s a little difficult to know where to start. She has written a handful of books for YAs, most notably the Unicorn series (Black Unicorn, Gold Unicorn, and Red Unicorn) and this volume, published under the Firebird imprint. The rest of her books vary from short story collections, to an entry in the “Fairy Tales” series (like Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin), to future-set science-fictionish books (The Silver Metal Lover) and books that are more likely considered horror novels. She apparently wasn’t able to read until she was eight, but seems to have made up for that with a vengeance.

Jet is fourteen and has two older sisters, both of whom went crazy (in Jet’s opinion) when they turned sixteen. Now the oldest one, Turquoise, has a minor role in a big Ollywood film, and the entire family moves across the planet (one of Earth’s colony planets) so she can film. Jet, having no ambition to be involved in the film world, is annoyed and bored out of her mind, so she takes her robotic dog Otis (who has missed his six-month maintenance appointment) and goes to explore. Their wandering leads them to a place called Indigara, which is under the Ollywood main complex, and seems to have been created out of the lost worlds of a few pilot movies that never went anywhere. Can Jet and Otis return, unharmed? And how will this affect Turquoise’s movie?

“Indigara” is actually formed of the first syllables of the first words of the four pilot movies (meaning a two-hour movie, often made for TV, that’s intended to have a TV series spun off of it); the strange world seems to have sucked in a handful of minor Ollywood actors. Jet and Otis get there by being sucked through a pipe of sorts; they are originally following a dragon. I thought it was quite a good premise for a book: what happens to all the worlds created for TV series that get cancelled, or never even make it onto a network? We, the TV viewers, only see a small percent of all the shows that are proposed, and even a large percentage of those get cancelled after one season. Because of this premise, the format is rather like a movie script; each section is preceded by a description such as “scene: cut to” or something similar.

Jet is a very amusing narrator; her initial comments about her sisters (she calls them “bitch[es] on wheels”) were pretty hilarious, and drew me into the novel right away. I thought Otis was also a great narrator. His sections were written in a very formal, almost computer-like format, as befits his status as a robot dog, but he still managed to have a great sense of humor and the ironic. The other sections were in a third-person omniscient format; these were best at showing us what was happening in Jet’s world while she was not there, and in some ways, they represented the funniest scenes in the book. I won’t give too much away, but there was a significant amount of drama on the movie set that had nothing to do with the film itself.

It’s short, and a pretty fast read, and I’d definitely recommend it. I found it very easy to enjoy, and rather unlike all the other Tanith Lee I’d read, which tended to be a bit heavy on unpleasant situations. (That’s not to say that I haven’t enjoyed other books by Ms. Lee!) Fans of film will definitely enjoy the novel; the closest book I can compare it to would be something like Paula Danziger’s This Place Has No Atmosphere, or other decidedly humorous near-future off-world light children’s spec fic. Although there are references to various light sexual situations, I’d say this book is appropriate for ten-year-olds and up; perhaps those who had finished The Spiderwick Chronicles or the Series of Unfortunate Events recently might enjoy this as a bridge to slightly older YA lit. 4.5/5 stars.