Little-known but fantastic YA novel from Pinkwater, which manages to be both incredibly quirky and entertaining and teach valuable life lessons without ever quite seeming to do so. Leonard Neeble begins the eighth grade as a new student at a depressingly realistic middle school, with teachers who couldn't care less, no friends, and vacuously out-of-touch parents. He finally befriends a strange kid named Alan Mendlesohn, who has a knack for messing with the status quo and shares Leonard's innate smarts and curiosity. Together, the two get sucked into a strange world of psychic powers, new age con artists and interplanetary biker gangs, all the while dealing with equally absurd aspects of their middle school lives.

Filled with a love for old neighborhoods and local businesses, and a sadness even more relevant today at the disappearance of weird independent bookstores and quirky corner chili parlors, the book also is steeped in a healthy distrust of institutions and authority; everything from new age mysticism to psychiatry to religious dogma to suburban life gets put under scrutiny by Leonard, who learns above all else during the novel to think for himself, rather than buy what anyone else is selling. At the book's core is a rather astonishingly insightful reading of the entire purpose and destiny of civilization itself. Chock full of Pinkwater's trademark quirky characters and humor. The ending peters out a bit, but there's more than enough in the earlier pages to make this worthwhile for readers of any age. ( )