Ocean State Libraries

When twelve-year-old Eli becomes involved with the time travel experiments that the government pressures his parents to pursue, he travels to fifth-century Alexandria, Egypt, where he meets Thea, a scholar accused of sorcery, and Clyne, an extraterrestrial saurian who is working on a homework assignment.

The Library of Alexandria, one of the wonders of the Ancient World, has haunted Western culture for over 2,000 years. The Ptolemaic kings of Egypt--successors of Alexander the Great--had a staggering ambition: to house all of the books ever written under one roof, and the story of the universal library and its destruction still has the power to move us. But what was the library, and where was it? Did it exist at all? Contemporary descriptions are...