THE SCHOOL FOR THE INSANELY GIFTED
by Dan Elish
From the author of Attack of the Frozen Woodchucks (2008) comes an equally surreal cyber-caper loosely attached to an incoherent story line.
At 11 3/4, Daphna is already a talented composer, whose music transports listeners into refreshing trances—so she fits right in with the rest of her genius New York schoolmates. Harkin “Thunk” Thunkenreiser is developing a chewing-gum computer that puts the chewer online as long as the flavor lasts, and her friend Cynthia is recasting Macbeth as a one-woman musical while starring in a string of smash Broadway hits. Two months after her mother’s disappearance at sea, ineffectual pursuers wearing antelope masks pursue grieving Daphna and her allies to a hidden valley on Mount Kilimanjaro, where the children find evidence that the school’s great benefactor, digital entrepreneur Ignatius Blatt (think Steve Jobs with the fashion sense of Ronald McDonald) has actually stolen all the wildly popular digital gadgets he claims to have invented himself. Thanks to a spy in Daphna’s circle of friends, Blatt releases contact-lens computers that give him control (through a ring on his finger) over the minds of those who wear them. The shoveled-together climax is of a piece with the rest of this overstuffed, self-conscious tale.
Confused readers will wish that the author had spent a lot more time fitting together the random and extraneous elements here. (Fantasy. 10-12)