Josh and the Cargan

Josh and the Cargan by M.L. Hollinger

This book tells the story of a teenage boy whose life is complicated by a strange inheritance from his great grandfather. Josh Smith wants to be a rock star. He has a band and composes music, but fame is elusive. At the same time he's experiencing all the problems any boy his age faces, chief of which is his desire to be intimate with a girl. Like many young boys, he's a bit shy about approaching the opposite sex, and he suffers because of it.

He inherits one of his great grandfather's ugly sculptures and discovers it's really a Cargan, a device enabling interplanetary travel as a strange form called an entity. The Cargan solves his problem with girls, but it creates another, more sinister, problem when he discovers another person on Earth has a Cargan. Mark Wycham, a wealthy businessman, is working with a villain from the planet Ula to take control of several other planets. Josh and an unusual partner help thwart that scheme while finding a girl he loves.