In her entertaining modern-day fantasy set in Maine, Delia Sherman (Changeling; The Freedom Maze) examines whether an evil wizard can also be good; the qualities necessary for success; and the importance of writing one's own story.
Ever since 12-year-old Nick Reynaud's mother died three years ago, Uncle Gabe had gone "from crabby to mean." After his uncle locks him in the cellar, the boy runs away to avoid the rest of the "larruping" he was promised. Cold, tired, hungry and blinded by snow, Nick stumbles upon an enormous, sprawling house whose front door opens into the magically sentient shop, Evil Wizard Books. Three-hundred-year-old Evil Wizard Smallbone takes the boy into his strangely cozy lair, deems him "scrawny as a plucked chicken and numb as a haddock," renames him "Foxkin" and forces him into service as his new apprentice (more like minion). As the months pass, Nick studies hard and winds up learning as much about himself as he does about "fummydiddling with enchanted doo-dads." Meanwhile, trouble is brewing in quaint Smallbone Cove, the nearby coastal town of fishing nets and seagulls, a "practically perfect place" of eerily similar townspeople controlled and supposedly protected by the Evil Wizard Smallbone. A second evil wizard, vile werewolf Fidelou with his gang of shape-shifting were-coyotes on motorcycles, wants in, and Nick will have to use all of his wits and newly honed magic when the two evil wizards go head to head.
The Evil Wizard Smallbone is a terrific middle-grade fantasy from a skillful, witty, always-inventive storyteller. --Lynn Becker, blogger and host of Book Talk, a monthly online discussion of children's books for SCBWI