Description: "'It's a monster of a world' for fifteen-year-old Shreve Cannon, incarcerated in Casimir Pulaski Juvenile Detention Center for Boys: 'not quite prison. Not quite a Hilton.' Words are Shreve's thing--how he sells contraband candy, how he survives in a sometimes brutal world. But words fail him when he's assigned a new roommate, Jack Graves--'slight, pale, and still,' with large brown eyes, a dead voice, and twelve fingers, six on each hand. It turns out that Jack has special powers that resulted in the hospitalization of five kids at his previous foster home. When the mysterious Quincrux and his witchy counterpart Ilsa begin stalking Shreve and Jack, Jack's powers are called upon, forcing the boys to make an explosive escape. As the fugitives wander from state to state, the narrative also meanders, but readers will enjoy this trilogy debut, a wild and riveting tale full of allusions to fairy tales, movies, and comic book heroes--including the witch, the wolf at the door, the Hulk, Jack Sprat, Godzilla, Spiderman, and Hansel and Gretel, all contributing a mythic scale to the whole affair. Polydactyl heroes are rare in children's literature, and so are novels like this that make the fantastical utterly believable." --The Horn Book Magazine

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