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  • Atherton: The House of Power
  • Cindy Welch
Carman, Patrick Atherton: The House of Power. Little, 2007330 p ISBN 0-316-16670-7$16.99 R Gr. 5-8

Edgar has spent his young life helping maintain the fig trees on Tabletop, the middle part of the three-tiered world of Atherton, which also includes a virtually uninhabitable lower level known as the Flatlands and an exclusive verdant upper level known as the Highlands. A hazy memory moves Edgar to explore the steep cliffs separating agricultural Tabletop from the powerful Highlands; in a cliff recess there he finds an old leatherbound book, which Edgar, illiterate like the rest of his class, cannot read. As he sneaks into Highlands seeking an upper-class reader, he comes across Samuel, another eleven-year-old, and the two learn from the book that Atherton is sinking in upon itself; soon the Highlands will be on the same level with Tabletop, upending the social order. When Samuel is discovered with the book, it is taken from him and given to ruthless Lord Phineas, who controls Atherton's House of Power and who prepares to go to war. Only Edgar, Samuel, and a young girl named Isabel, who is a crack shot with a slingshot and hard black figs, stand between the good folks of Tabletop and the authoritarian control of the dark-robed Lord Phineas. This is a lively and absorbing adventure; the omniscient narrator, who occasionally comments on character's actions, creates some useful distance between the action and the reader that reassures us that Edgar's story will likely end well. Several soft pencil drawings in blacks and grays, scattered throughout the book add a hint of menace, and bits of a mad scientist's journal enhance the feeling that this is a world slightly out of control. There is plenty of danger and mystery, too, for young adventurers who will eagerly follow Edgar up and over cliffs and into dark caves in his quest to save his world.

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