Mathemagics

Mathemagics, Margaret Ball, Baen Books, 1996

This is the fantasy story of Riva Konneva, a woman from the hills of a sword-and-sorcery world called Dazau, who wants to give her daughter a good education. She commutes between there and the Planet of the Paper Pushers (present-day Austin, Texas) where her daughter, Salla, is in sixth grade in a local elementary school.

First, Riva is told that Salla is to be taken out of the school's gifted program and put in the emotionally disturbed class because she shows too much initiative. Salla's father, a wizard, shows up from Dazau with regaining custody on his mind, and ingratiates himself with a local fundamentalist preacher. He causes, using some Dazau magic, a large number of science fiction and romance books (which the preacher considers filth) to disappear from a local bookstore. The books don't just disappear; they travel to Dazau and their main characters come to life.

Salla and a couple of friends travel to Dazau, where math has magical powers, and get into big trouble, requiring rescue by Riva and Dennis, a math teacher at Salla's school, with whom Riva and Salla are living.

Personally, some of the characters were drawn a little too extreme, and it's full of science fiction "in" jokes, where a little goes a long way. This book is in that large gray area of just pretty good.