Actually there are two heroes from our parallel world's otherwhere -- junior high arch enemies Jesse and Rich, who are sent to the principal's office for fighting and find themselves instead in a turnabout land where poetry is power and science is magic, and where a wolf, Fenris, who threatens to destroy both worlds has broken from a centuries-long captivity. Summoned by Eugenius Crump and Albertus Magnus, the boys are charged by the black Prime Minister with finding the three strands of the magic rope that will bind Fends; in return they are promised an unnamed reward that is ""priceless, stronger than life itself, but easily broken."" Readers will not share Jesse's and Rich's surprise when, the task accomplished by the union of Rich's logic and Jesse's poetry, they discover that the reward is friendship -- nor will the widely read fred everything here as strange and new as Jesse and Rich do. However Williams guides the companions through encounters with a good witch and an evil shape-changer, a screaming professor (he screams and he teaches screaming) and a series of dangerous illusions, with a professional skill that makes the most of borrowed motifs and adds a few turns of his own.