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When Camden becomes caught up in The Game and doing the Words with WT-3, she begins to experience bizarre dreams about the Bronze Planet and realizes that she must take desperate action to save her own world

Gr 6 Up Camden Douglas, after a month of summer camp, finds her buddy Mitch and her friends in the thrall of a strange teenager known as WT-3. Calling themselves ``Kidsters'' and replacing normal speech with ``The Words,'' they gather daily to stare into WT-3's power-unit and play the addicting ``Game.'' At night, Camden's sleep is disturbed by the Star Wind which carries her to the bronze planet. There the evil ``Teacher'' and the Word Police steal words from the minds of the inhabitants. Camden, revolting against the teaching of WT-3, is thrown out of the Kidsters. She slowly regains her lost ability to read and, following WT-3 down the Path of Light to the bronze planet, defeats the evil Teacher with the help of her indomitable cat Maggie. The book contains potentially fascinating pieces, yet is too fragmented to be believable. It jumps back and forth between dream and reality without letting readers become involved in either. Too much is unexplained. ``The Words'' with which the Kidsters address each other are hardly distinguishable from current teenage slang. Characters fluctuate without transition between flat extremesthe parents as ultra-reasonable or real jerks, Camden as rotten Kidster or too good to be true. Important characters like Mitch, WT-3 and the Teacher are not developed at all. The exception is Maggie, the catshe's great. Readers will agree with Camden as, toward the end of the book, she snarls, ``I've just about had enough of you and your power-units and your secret language and your stupid Game.'' Suggest Bradbury's Farenheit 451 instead.Constance A. Mellon, Department of Library & Information Studies, East Carolina University, Greenville, N.C. Copyright 1986 Cahners Business Information.