by Brandon Sanderson
Scholastic Press, 2007, Intermediate Fiction, 319 p.
Alcatraz has moved from foster home to foster home. Nobody keeps him long because his tendency to break things. When he turns 13 his grandfather shows up and whisks Alcatraz away into a new world full of magic and and ruled over by evil Librarians. Nothing is as he thought it was, including himself, his family, and his strange abilities.
I read this years ago and am reading it again because it is our parent/child book club book for March. Honestly, I had forgotten how silly it is, but really intelligent, too. Sanderson has an amazingly clever mind and his gives it full range here. This story has the potential to appeal to readers on many levels. There is enough action and humor to be enjoyable at face value, but for the more sophisticated reader it is packed full of devilishly funny irony and sarcasm. The rumor is that he wrote these books when he was working on other, harder projects, as a kind of mental recreation. The world of children's fantasy is so glad he did.
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