Evil Genius

This blog is not about me. Well it is about me, since it's my blog and you will get a dose of my writing and responses to things.

But this blog is about a great set of books I dscovered completely by accident in the library a few weeks back. My daughter (the 9-year-old, not the 15-year-old) is currently reading books in the YA section of the library, and is constantly after me to bring her home new material. Her favorite is animal books, but there's a limit to the amount of that stuff out there. So I went looking about the shelves at random, and came across this nice little book--okay, not so little, it's a bit thick for YA--called Evil Genius. See, the title wasn't about me at all, so there.

Evil Genius is the story of young Cadel Piggott, a man of incredible smarts raised by people of incredible dumbs. He is taken to see a 'therapist', Thaddeus Roth, but it quickly becomes clear that Roth's method to deal with Cadel's moral quandaries is to remove his sense of morality altogether. To this end, he and Cadel's father, the supervillain known as Phineas Darkkon, have created an academy of Evil know as the Axis Institute for World Domination (eat your feeble English school heart out, Hogwarts).

I stop at this point because I don't want to divulge too many spoilers, and this book deserves a close read. Harry and his friends have nothing on Cadel and his enemies. In many respects this book is a YA version of Soon I Will Be Invincible, another superhero novel on the evolution of the villain, equally fun is a totally different way. Doctor Horrible too, but without the songs.

I liked this book so much that we went out and bought both it an its sequel, Genius Squad, and have read them both. We eagerly await the next in the series, Genius Wars.