Broken Crescent

From Booklist Nate Black used to be Azrael, a hacker who broke every system he could. Now reformed, he is in school for network security. When he receives an e-mail from "@," indicating that someone knows about Azrael, he assumes it's the feds and panics. Somehow, this results in him landing in another world, populated by humans and the alien ghadi, in which he doesn't speak the language yet is interrogated by strange, masked figures and tossed in a dungeon to rot. Rescued by Yerith, a small part of a conspiracy to overthrow the rule of the College of Man, Nate learns some history of ghadi-human relations, the regular language, and, when the Shadow College lets him, the God's Language, which imparts the ability to cast spells. The God's Language is taught only by rote, but programmer Nate takes it as a challenge, absorbing enough to overthrow the old order. A fast-paced, entertaining tale of the boundary between magic and science. Regina Schroeder Copyright В© American Library Association. All rights reserved