...[a] sweet, charming, and just a little overcrowded love letter to geek culture ... [the] mother/son bond is right on the border of co-dependent, so specific in its sweetness that it manages to avoid becoming saccharine ... It is a lot. A whole lot. And while it can be fun to watch these stories intersect and play off one another, the overall effect is overcrowded. Dropping one of A Hundred Thousand World’s storylines would have given the remaining characters much-needed room to breathe and develop ... The book is definitely one to read if you get misty-eyed over storytelling and geek culture makes your heart sing.
Proehl’s comic book savvy shines bright. Short, single-scene chapters with playful titles give the story a fun, popcorn vibe. Point-of-view shifts between chapters are seamless as Proehl sticks to third-person. Time moves between chapters like the space between panels in a comic book ... If you’re not already familiar with the comics industry, these references can be a little distracting ... a heartwarming, thought-provoking piece of fiction.
A Hundred Thousand Worlds is a charming, sprawling novel by an author whose ambition, while laudable, sometimes gets the best of him ... Proehl's best accomplishment in the book is the very realistic, and very sweet, relationship between Valerie and Alex ... But the novel is, unfortunately, way too busy, and the other characters aren't as well-realized as Valerie and Alex ... messy at times, but it's not without its charms.
This story is told as an ingenuous picaresque ... Anyone who has ever cared about comics, cons, cosplay, The X-Files, or geek parenting will relate to at least one of this book’s threads, and Proehl does a great job of outlining the different facets of the world ... Some things don’t work. Proehl wants to tie some thematic elements of the book to Tony Kushner’s masterpiece Angels in America but the references don’t really go anywhere. Also, and this is a bigger problem, Alex is a little too precocious ... will non-comics folk care about this? I’m going to tentatively say yes.
