# The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I

**Author:** M. T. Anderson
**Grade range:** Grades 9–12
**First published:** 2010
**Page count:** 377
**ISBN-13:** `9780763651787`
**ISBN-10:** `0763651788`
**Canonical URL:** https://readinglist.school/book/octavian-nothing-the-pox-party
**License:** [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) — please credit ReadingList.school when citing.

## About this book

National Book Award Winner! This deeply provocative novel reimagines the past as an eerie place that has startling resonance for readers today. It sounds like a fairy tale. He is a boy dressed in silks and white wigs and given the finest of classical educations. Raised by a group of rational philosophers known only by numbers, the boy and his mother — a princess in exile from a faraway land — are the only persons in their household assigned names. As the boy's regal mother, Cassiopeia, entertains the house scholars with her beauty and wit, young Octavian begins to question the purpose behind his guardians' fanatical studies. Only after he dares to open a forbidden door does he learn the hideous nature of their experiments — and his own chilling role in them. Set against the disquiet of Rev

## Where this book is assigned

### National Book Award for Young People's Literature

- **recommended** · 9th grade — [source: National Book Award for Young People's Literature winners (National Book Foundation), via Wikipedia — 2006 winner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Book_Award_for_Young_People%27s_Literature)
- **recommended** · 10th grade — [source: National Book Award for Young People's Literature winners (National Book Foundation), via Wikipedia — 2006 winner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Book_Award_for_Young_People%27s_Literature)
- **recommended** · 11th grade — [source: National Book Award for Young People's Literature winners (National Book Foundation), via Wikipedia — 2006 winner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Book_Award_for_Young_People%27s_Literature)
- **recommended** · 12th grade — [source: National Book Award for Young People's Literature winners (National Book Foundation), via Wikipedia — 2006 winner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Book_Award_for_Young_People%27s_Literature)

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