shows off the full range of Pinkwater's masterful storytelling skills. The life of Leonard Neeble is superbly paced as it glides along at a natural gait, beginning in an ordinary American junior high school and moving from one small surprise to another so that by the novel's end he has journeyed between alternative planes of existence as if that were an entirely logical thing for him to do. The narrative is notable not only for its pacing, but for its depth and comedy. Leonard and Alan, for instance, begin their work on the Hyperstellar Archeology course: The course, which was really just a book, told how there were clues to the existence of ancient civilizations all around us. It gave a lot of examples. It said that certain words in modern languages are really Lemurian or Atlantean words. It said that Haya and Doon were the...