The Colliding Worlds of Mina Lee by Ellen Oh
Published by Crown PRH on January 23, 2024
ISBN: 0593125940
Pages: 295
Genres: Romance, Science Fiction
Format: Chapter Book Fiction
Source: MSL Book Review
Goodreads

Korean American Mina Lee is entering her senior year of high school, and more than anything she wants to apply to art school. But her emotionally distant father forbids it. He wants her to have a “real” career and, even more than that, art reminds him of Mina’s mother, who died three years earlier in an accident.

Mina decides to create a webcomic in an effort to prove to him not just that she is committed to art, but also that she can be a success. Her story is loosely based on her own high school, but in the webcomic version, students have superpowers and an evil villain, Merco, is trying to steal those powers. Then, one night during a freak lightning storm, she gets pulled out of the real world and into her webcomic. The first person she meets is romantic hero Jin, the teenage version of her childhood best friend, who died of cancer years earlier. He becomes a valuable ally as well as a love interest, as it quickly becomes clear that despite being the creator, she is also the heroine of the story – and the rules are changing quickly. Returning home is the only way to turn things back to where they should have been without her interference – but it also means leaving Jin.

This book will be popular with readers who enjoy stories about alternate worlds and humans with superpowers. Grief is a constant theme, with Mina’s mother and Jin both having died in her world. Some scenes skirt a fairly graphic line, with powered teens being experimented on by the evil supervillain, but don’t go into too much detail (and Mina ultimately saves everyone). Oh has fun playing with the standard tropes in this kind of novel, with Mina recognizing key upcoming moments that will be more dangerous – for example, she correctly predicts that the school dance will be a perfect scene for a climactic clash between factions of good and evil.

Characters and cast were diverse in both real and webcomic worlds, which was a positive; but given the sheer size of secondary cast members, few were fully realized. An enjoyable and fairly undemanding read that will probably circulate well in library collections given both the subject and the name recognition of the author.

– Jenny Martinez Nocito, Maine State Library, Augusta