Tesla’s Attic by Neal Shusterman (review)

Following the death of his mother in a house fire, Nick Slate moves with his father and brother to Colorado Springs, taking up residence in the down-at-the-heels house of a deceased relative. Nick has two immediate goals: to stay under the radar at his new middle school, and to make some quick cash by selling attic junk at a garage sale. Goal one is a non-starter when garrulous classmate Mitch takes Nick loudly under his wing, but goal two is unbelievably successful, especially once Nick turns on an antique lamp that seems to draw customers who bid up the prices on the castoffs. When the appliances begin acting strangely all over Colorado Springs and shady adults clad in pearlized suits take sinister interest in Nick, he discovers that his distant auntie had been Nikola Tesla’s fancy lady, and he deduces that the bits and bobs now scattered over the city fit together into a mysterious but potent machine. This surely sounds like the storyline to any number of novels already on the shelf, and even Tesla has become a bit too ubiquitous of late, but Shusterman and Elfman have crafted a plot more devious, characters far quirkier, climaxes (yes, there are two) more breathless, and a narration much, much funnier than recent mad-science offerings. Sticking with a third-person narration frees the authors to be as wryly and sophisticatedly witty as they please without compromising the veracity of their middle-school cast, resulting in storytelling as delightful as the story being told. At the end of the first book in a planned trilogy, Tesla’s invention has wrought some serious damage, and Nick and friends are off to reanimate a dearly departed pal. If that won’t bring back readers for Volume Two, what will?