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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Lake Elmo Library | J FICTION SAN | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | J FICTION SAN | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | J FICTION SAN | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | J FICTION SAN | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Valley Library (Lakeland) | J FICTION SAN | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Alcatraz Smedry has an incredible talent...for breaking things! It generally gets him into a lot of trouble, but can he use it to save the day? In this second Alcatraz adventure, Alcatraz finds himself on a mission to save Grandpa Smedry...until he gets swept up by a flying glass dragon filled with his unusually usual yet mouthy Smedry cohorts. Their mission? A dangerous, library-filled one of course! This time they are on their way to the ancient and mysterious Library of Alexandria (which some silly people think was long ago destroyed!) where they must find Grandpa Smedry, look for clues leading to Alcatraz's potentially undead dead father, and battle the creepy and dangerous soul sucking Curators who await them.
Author Notes
Brandon Sanderson was born on December 19, 1975 in Lincoln, Nebraska. He received a bachelor's degree in English and a master's degree in creative writing from Brigham Young University. His first book, Elantris, was published in 2005. His other works include the Mistborn series, the Stormlight Archive series, Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians series, and the Reckoners series. In 2007, he was chosen by Harriet Rigney to complete A Memory of Light, book twelve in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. He has continued the series with Towers of Midnight and A Memory of Light. In 2018 his title, White Sand Volume 2, made the Best Seller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 5-9-Alcatraz Smedry is back for another action-packed adventure in the second book (Scholastic, 2008) in the series by Brandon Sanderson. In this installment, he's joined by a cast of characters both new and old and they are joining forces to rescue his grandfather and the father he always thought was dead from the Library of Alexandria. They must deal with the soul-sucking keepers of the library and a dangerous "Scriveners Bone" who is out to destroy Alacatraz and his whole family. Once again, Ramon de Ocampo is able to keep the right balance between clueless and annoying in his vocalization of Alcatraz. The boy still has the habit of breaking off from telling the story to make random comments, many bordering on the overly absurd. Listeners, especially those who have not been introduced to Alcatraz before, may lose patience with this personality quirk. Alcatraz also launches into long "lessons" he hopes listeners will take from the book, and this becomes tiresome. However, the narrator's channeling of the character and his ability to convey the many detailed landscapes that Alcatraz enters as he moves through the library makes this a rousing tale that will especially please fans of the first volume.-Shari Fesko, Southfield Public Library, MI (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Horn Book Review
(Intermediate, Middle School) "I need to come clean," admits Alcatraz Smedry, thirteen-year-old hero of the free world (a secret continent between Asia and North America), charged with saving the Hushlands (all the other continents) from the tyrannical rule of evil librarians (see Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians, rev. 1/08). "Not all librarians are evil cultists," he concedes. "Some librarians are instead vengeful undead who want to suck your soul." And that second category is what Alcatraz braves when he tracks his missing grandfather to the Library of Alexandria. In addition to Alcatraz's not-quite harnessed magic Talent (breaking things), he has his uncle Kaz (Talent: getting lost), his cousin Australia (Talent: waking up ugly), and his friend, the stiff-upper-lipped but parentally downtrodden Bastille, on his side. Against him stand the Scrivener's Bones, an extra-evil librarian sect with a fondness for Alivening things (think Frankenstein meets necromancy). Nothing is easy; the Smedry Talents exacerbate as often as ameliorate peril, and it is to the author's credit that the logic behind Alcatraz's periodic ingenious ideas is always established well in advance. Sanderson gives due weight to his characters' dangerous situation and its emotional implications, balancing absurdity, action, and character growth for a thoroughly thrilling read. At the same time, he goes to town with narrative games (including a fake ending) and metafictive whimsy ("I feel I need to break the action here to warn you that I frequently break the action to mention trivial things"), all couched in Alcatraz's utterly accessible, wiseacre voice. From HORN BOOK, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Searching for his grandfather, Oculator Alcatraz Smedry follows him to Egypt and into the Library of Alexandria. There he battles soul-stealing Curators and a librarian of the Scrivener's Bones, part man, part machine and a user of Dark Oculary. In this second of a series presented as a memoir, Alcatraz experiments with leadership and learns a little more about his own Breaker Talent, including the possibility that it may be dangerous. One of the good guys, perhaps, in a world controlled by Evil Librarians, Alcatraz is also smirkily self-conscious, an annoying narrator who interrupts himself with irrelevancies, apologies and instructions to the reader. They should have started with the first volume, he warns, and, in fact, those who didn't may find the setting confusing and the cast hard to keep straight. The animation-style action seems more appropriate to a big screen than a reader's imagination, and veers from implausible to impossible and random. Trying too hard to be strange, the effect is not fun but forced. (Fantasy. 10-14) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
