![]() ![]() ![]() To start, in an alternate ending to the previous episode, Principal Krupp ends up in prison (“…a lot like being a student at Jerome Horwitz Elementary School, except that the prison had better funding”). Not that there aren’t pranks and envelope-pushing quips aplenty. Sure signs that the creative wells are running dry at last, the Captain’s ninth, overstuffed outing both recycles a villain (see Book 4) and offers trendy anti-bullying wish fulfillment. He doubts that librarians will recommend this book. Alcatraz often interrupts his story with comments about reading, sometimes predicting accurately that we won’t believe the events on the page. Awkward similes add absurdity but stop the narrative flow. The premise is intriguing and Sanderson gets in some good digs at pushers of books about dysfunctional families and dying dogs, but the joke becomes tiresome with repetition. In the course of the story, he knocks down floors, a wall and two doors in the main library. Members of his family have Talents we might call liabilities. ![]() Alcatraz says this is the first volume of an autobiography that will prove he is not really a hero or even very nice. Part of the contradictory flavor of this self-referential fantasy is that the good guys are named for famous prisons. On his 13th birthday, Alcatraz Smedry receives a bag of sand and burns down his foster mother’s kitchen, beginning his involvement in the struggle between the Free Kingdoms and the world we know, controlled by a conspiracy of Evil Librarians. ![]()
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