JO LAROUCHE HAS lived her 13 years in the California desert with her Aunt Lily, ever since she was dropped on Lily’s doorstep with this note: This is Jo. Please take care of her. But beware. This is a dangerous baby. At Lily’s annual Christmas costume party, a variety of strange events take place that lead Jo and Lily out of California forever—and into the mysterious, strange, fantastical world of Eldritch City. There, Jo learns the scandalous truth about who she is, and she and Lily join the Order of Odd-Fish, a collection of knights who research useless information. Glamorous cockroach butlers, pointless quests, obsolete weapons, and bizarre festivals fill their days, but two villains are controlling their fate. Jo is inching closer and closer to the day when her destiny is fulfilled, and no one in Eldritch City will ever be the same. "Hilarious . . . Readers with a finely tuned sense of the absurd are going to adore the Technicolor ride." -- Booklist "A work of mischievous imagination and outrageous invention." -- Time Out Chicago "An extraordinary and delightfully weird romp that's one part China Mieville, one part Lemony Snicket, with trace amounts of Madeline L'Engle and Roald Dahl." --Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother "Over the top? Yes . . . fantasy done to a clever, grotesque, nonsensical turn." -- Chicago Sun-Times The Order of Odd-Fish  is James Kennedy's first novel. He is also the founder and curator of the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival, in which kid filmmakers createshort  movies that tell the entire stories of Newbery-winning books in about 90 seconds, which screens annually in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and many other cities around the United States. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Chicago. The desert was empty, as though a great drain had sucked the world underground. Every color, every sound had vanished, leaving nothing but flat sand and silence. Except for the ruby palace. If you were blasting down the highway in the middle of the night, somewhere near Dust Creek, you probably wouldn't even see it. Or just blackness, a red flash in the distance, and then nothing. It was tucked away behind the mountains, alone and nearly forgotten, the old house of Lily Larouche. From the highway the ruby palace sparkled silently. Come a couple of miles closer, though, and you could hear the buzz of voices--closer, and squeals of laughter, snatches of music, raucous shouts--Lily Larouche was throwing a party. The last hundred yards and suddenly the ruby palace loomed all around, slumping and sprawling over acres of sand and weeds like a monstrous, glittering cake. Its garden swarmed with exotic flowers, vegetables of startling colors, and dark ponds with fat, ill-tempered toads; strings of lights were flung throughout the crooked trees, twinkling like fireflies, and torches flickered all along the stacked and twisting terraces. Strange shapes moved in the shadows. A man dressed as an astronaut chatted with a devil. A gang of cavemen sipped fizzing cocktails. A Chinese emperor flirted with a robot, a pirate arm-wrestled a dinosaur, a giant worm danced with a refrigerator--it was Lily Larouche's Christmas costume party, and all her old friends had come. A blossoming bush grew on the garden patio. At first the bush seemed ordinary; but then two green eyes flashed inside it, and stared. It was a thirteen-year-old girl, small and thin, with brown skin and black bobbed hair. Her name was Jo Larouche. She was Lily Larouche's niece. She also lived at the ruby palace, and she was spying. "Where did he go?" Jo took a bite of her scrambled-egg sandwich and watched the party intensely. Jo never talked to Aunt Lily's friends, but she loved spying on them. They usually ignored her--but tonight's party was different. Tonight someone was watching her. A fat man was looking for her. Jo's eyes darted over the crowd. The fat man had been wearing what looked like a military uniform, staring at her across the patio, tugging his beard and pointing at his stomach, rumbling something in a Russian accent. Jo had no idea what. One thing was for sure: the fat Russian was nobody she or Aunt Lily knew. She couldn't see him anymore--maybe he had left. Good. She intended to enjoy tonight. Jo closed her eyes and inhaled the familiar smell of Aunt Lily's parties: the lemony smoke of tiki torches; the clashing, flowery perfumes; the warm musk of cigarettes . . . She heard Aunt Lily's name. Jo peered out of the bush. A couple of feet away, a woman disguised as an enormous eggplant was talking to a man dressed like a UFO. "Did you see?" whispered the eggplant. "Lily's gone nuts again." "Cracked as a crawdad, and worse every year," said the UFO. "The woman's going to hurt herself." "It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the poor girl. Do you know, I've never even seen her?" "I heard she's some kind of freak, actually," said the UFO. "Remember what the newspapers said about her being