Xavier Oak (‘Zay’ for short), his father, Caleb, and his very heavily pregnant stepmother, Nia, have travelled from Montreal to their holiday cottage by the lake … but when they wake the next morning, the lake has disappeared. They find themselves in a totally different environment: there are no roads or power poles. Instead, there are goats and chickens. It feels as if their cottage has been lifted up in the night and dropped somewhere else. Each of them attempts to explain how it might have happened. Zay opts for alien abduction. The family finds they’re enclosed within a transparent dome.
Of course they try to break through, but the dome repairs itself. Nia goes into early labour, and it goes horribly wrong, but they all wake to find a healthy boy, Noah, nestled in Nia’s arms. Have their unseen captors helped them? So, whoever/whatever they are, are they benign or malignant?
Three years later, the Oaks have contentedly resigned themselves to farm life. Zay is now 16. He witnesses what he thinks are ‘midges’ building another cottage near theirs. Days later, the Jacksons arrive – bewildered – from Tennessee. To Zay’s delight, there’s a daughter, Mackenzie. His hormones go into overdrive. The father, Riley, is very confident in his own opinions. Riley scoffs at the idea of aliens – he’s certain this is a ‘deep-state’ government operation, and he’s determined to escape, using the weapons he came with.
If the dome is Eden, then Riley is the serpent. His ideas are at once enticing and repellant and may just signal the fall from the paradise they’ve come to call home.
Reviewed by Bob Moore
Age Guide 12+
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I was born in Port Alberni, a mill town on Vancouver Island, British Columbia but spent the bulk of my childhood in Victoria, B.C. and on the opposite coast, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. At around twelve I decided I wanted to be a writer.
I started out writing sci-fi epics then went on to swords and sorcery tales and then, during the summer holiday when I was 14, started on a humorous story about a boy addicted to video games.
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