Title: The Rover
Author: Mel Odom
Genre: Fantasy
Reading Level: Adult

June's BAM challenge is Knowledge. Katie gave us lots of ideas, but I had had good luck searching our catalog and NoveList Plus before, so I started with our catalog (http://www.pamcat.org/). Found two books with knowledge in the title that looked good, until they came in delivery.

Using NoveList Plus, I just entered "knowledge" as a search term and limited it to adult and fiction. What I got was The Rover by Mel Odom (among other things). I remember that when I purchased this for our library, this fantasy intrigued me, but I did not remember that Wick (the main character) is a Third Level Librarian in the Vault of all Known Knowledge. So The Rover looked like the perfect choice.

I happen to love books where I get to follow characters around a world that I am unfamiliar with. It can be Tudor England, modern day Kansas, or a spaceship winging its way to a new planet. I am not picky about genre (the only one I don't read is westerns) and the pacing can be fast or slow. I mostly want to fall into a world and live there for a few hours or days.

I lived with Edgewick Lamplighter for most of last weekend. I had no plans except to relax and read and so I opened The Rover with great anticipation. Odom did not steer me wrong. He has created a wonderful world with pirate, trolls, elves and great battles of good versus evil. Just what I needed for an extended read.

Edgewick Lamplighter has been a third level librarian for way too long. He works in the Vault of all Known Knowledge where they are busily cataloging the history of the world. He spends much of his free time reading books from the Hralbomm Wing of the library - these books are full of frivolity, which apparently has "no place in the proper history of the world."

Fortunately for us all, Edgewick, Wick to his friends, has to deliver a message for the Grandmagister. And although I could see that this was going to give Wick the opportunity for quest, I could not have ever guessed how the author was going to get Wick the adventures of a lifetime.

The story is a magical quest, like The Hobbit and even a bit like Harry Potter, but Odom took familiar stories and made them new. I give The Rover 3 stars (***). Next time I have a long weekend, the next volume, The Destruction of the Books is probably going along.