Wildside (1996) 316 pages by Steven Gould.

Loved it. Wildside is an alternate universe story. Charlie Newell has a gate to an alternate Earth where humans never evolved. There are dangers on the wildside. There is danger of the government or some entity finding out about the gate.

Charlie's Uncle Max died and left him a ranch that contained the gate, and now that Charlie is 18 the ranch is his. He has just graduated high school and he has come up with a plan, first he gets his friend Marie, Joey, Rick and Clara to help him with a project to raise some capital. Then on to the bigger plan.

It's a story of those five teenagers without us knowing that it is, because of all of the other action going on.

The meticulous preparations that Charlie makes is so reminiscent of the preparations that Davy makes in Jumper that if there were no author's name on the book, I would still know that it was the same author. There's a lot of talk about flying, getting pilots licenses, planes, dangers of flying, maintenance and more aviation stuff. If every novel had this it would get boring, but this was the first one that I've run across, and that information was worked into the story, seamlessly.

It's exciting. The characters are likable, at least the protagonists. There's a pace to the story, easy to read, hard to put down. Terrific.