Here, There Be Dragons -- James A Owen

Oxford, 1917.  A professor is murdered and his only student, John, learns the truth about his education:  He has been being groomed to become the Caretaker of the Imaginarium Geographica, an atlas of imaginary worlds. 

Along with his new companions, Jack and Charles, and their guide, Bert, John just manages to escape the clutches of a terrifying pack of Wendigo and flees Oxford aboard the Indigo Dragon -- a ship manned by fauns and captained by Bert's Pirate Queen daughter, Aven. 

Their first stop?  Avalon.

From there, they journey further into the Imaginary Lands, determined to save them from the Winter King, who is just as determined to bring the entire world under his control and place it in eternal Shadow.  Nemo, the Green Knight, Deucalion, the Loch Ness monster and Pandora's Box all make cameo appearances.  There are also references to Lewis Carroll, J. M. Barrie, Charles Dickens, King Arthur, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allen Poe and others. 

The back of the review copy reveals the true identities of the three adventurers, but I'd rather not do that here.

While the idea itself is fabulous and fun -- I was so excited to read this book -- I found the actual prose disappointing and distracting.

It read like an expanded screenplay of a big-budget B-movie, complete with hokey and cliched dialogue.  The characters were likable, but they never felt like real people to me.  There was a whole lot of TELL, rather than SHOW, going on.

I could have gotten past it if the adventures themselves were cliched -- since we're working from the concept that this world is what inspired all of our Great Classics, that would make sense -- but it was the dialogue that killed it for me.