By Dustin Brady
A boy gets literally sucked inside his favorite video game and has to survive the levels from the inside to get back out.
Jesse Rigsby doesn't even like video games, so he's surprised when he gets yanked right inside one. One minute he's playing a game called Full Blast with his friend Eric, the next he's standing in the middle of it, being chased by the game's alien invaders for real. To escape, Jesse has to figure out the game's rules from the inside, dodge enemies, find the exit, and stay alive across level after level, all while a mystery about who trapped him there starts to unspool. It's a fast, funny, all-action ride told by a regular child in a very not-regular situation.
Some children want the game itself, not a diary or a joke book; this is the pure action pick for them. The whole story is a level-by-level survival run, so it moves like a game, always a new enemy, a new room, a new problem to solve before the timer runs out. Jesse Brady's black-and-white drawings break up the pages and the chapters are short and end on hooks, which is a proven formula for a reluctant reader: they finish one chapter fast, feel the win, and the cliffhanger yanks them into the next. It's a low-effort, high-thrill way onto real prose.