Leo@fergusrules.com

A lonely 14-year-old Filipino-Italian-American girl sets off on a virtual quest in Tangherlini's promising if uneven futuristic debut novel. There is much to like about the boastful, self-loathing first-person narrator, Leo, whose sassiness has gotten her thrown out of 17 different schools around the world. Feeling abandoned by her parents and living under guard in Manila with her ailing, superstitious grandmother Lola Flor, Leo spends her free time online, battling the forces of evil in the virtual land of Apeiron as her male alter ego, Fergus (inspired by William Butler Yeats's poem, ""Who Goes with Fergus""). Before the reader is given a chance to become immersed in Leo's troubled real teenage life, she ducks into her computer: ""Whenever I made a fool of myself in school or at home,"" she writes, ""I went to Apeiron to start over."" An electronic black hole, called Dlin, has swallowed a file containing her online kindred spirit, Bri, and with the help of the bumbling monk Fra Umberto, Leo heads out to find Bri and bring him back. The rest of the novel is an account of Leo's meandering odyssey to many strange lands, where she encounters Aristotle and Socrates (in a wax museum), gargoyles and former classmates and teachers. Ultimately, she lands in the furnace fueling a fantastic Zamboni ice-cleaning machine, peopled by tiny people much like ""duwendes,"" mythical creatures described to her by her grandmother. Leo's final epiphany is an unsurprising one--she realizes her ""strangeness"" is caused by her isolation--but Tangherlini's creative use of dream imagery and his appealing narrator redeem his unusual short novel. A moving afterword by Pagan Kennedy is a eulogy to the author, who died three weeks before the book was accepted for publication. (Oct.)