3.5 stars
First Sentence: When I was quite small I would sometimes dream of a city—which was strange, because, it began before I even knew what a city was.
Thoughts: Newfoundland after the apocalypse. No longer cold and icy, it has a temperate climate suitable for farming. In the Waknuk community the Strorms are in charge. The founding father of Waknuk, Elias Strorm, was run out of his previous town for being too much of a zealot. So he started his own town where he could preach his gospel of purity, keeping the area free of mutation.
As you can guess, The Apocalypse involved nuclear war.
David Strorm never knew his grandfather, which was a good thing. His father was just as much of a zealot, though. So when David met Sophie, he knew that he should never ever mention her at home. It was an innocent meeting. She saw David rolling down a hill and thought that looked fun so she joined him. But when Sophie got her foot caught in a crevice disaster struck. David had to take her shoe off to get her foot free, which means he saw that she had six toes. He didn’t think much of it, though. Even when her parents made him promise to keep it secret, he didn’t think of Sophie as a mutant. They remained good friends until the fateful day the town bully saw Sophie’s footprint. David helped Sophie and her family escape, but he wasn’t able to keep silent under his father’s whip. He never saw Sophie again.
When David’s uncle caught him talking to no one, David confessed that he was actually talking to his cousin Rosalind. They were able to talk to each other without being near each other. David’s uncle warned him to speak to her silently because he realized what David didn’t for many years: he was a mutant as well. And he and Rosalind weren’t the only ones. There were seven other children in the area who were telepathic. Later another arrived: David’s little sister Petra. Petra turned out to be stronger than all of them, able to speak to people all over the world. They tried to keep their abilities secret, but when one of the telepaths married a “normie,” they all ended up on the run. Their only hope of escape was one of Petra’s friends in New Zealand.
The thing about science fiction is that sometimes it turns out to be timely decades after it was published. A story about evangelists raging against the Other hits a little too close to home these days. Fortunately they all get what’s coming to them. I tell you this to give you hope through the most desperate parts of the story. David’s father was a horrible, horrible person and I’m glad he ended up the way he did. Especially after finding out what he did to Sophie. That was just too much.
The Eclectic Reviewer 