From Publishers Weekly
The author of the innovative Limit of Vision (2001) offers another challenging science fantasy. On an artificial world, the people, referred to as players, are reborn time after time, to rediscover their talents (if not their history) from past lives. Their needs are largely provided for by mechanical beetle-like kobolds, which appear out of wells. A silver fog that appears each night constantly reshapes the world. At age 10, Jubilee is devastated when her brother Jolly is taken by the silver, despite the usual protection by kobolds. He had oddly not shown any inherent talents, but in his last words claimed to have called the silver. Jubilee studies the silver assiduously in the ensuing years. The action picks up when she's 17. Her lover, Yaphet, is identified in a faraway town (like talents, mates repeat from former lives), a hauntingly familiar though menacing stranger appears out of the silver asking after Jolly as if Jolly were still alive, and the silver takes Jubilee's father. Jubilee joins her father's younger brother, Liam, on a quest for clues about players who survive the silver. What they learn and do affects the fate of their world. This poignant tale with the bones of hard science is bound to win Nagata new fans.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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From Booklist
Young Jubilee lives with her parents and brother, Jolly, in a remote temple, where they are protected by beetlelike metabolic machines from the nocturnal floods of "silver." The stuff, though called "breath-of-creation," "fog of souls," and "mind of a dreaming goddess," seemingly kills animate creatures and haphazardly transforms the landscape, erasing roads and leaving bizarre architecture in its wake. One terrifying night, the silver takes Jolly, while Jubilee watches, horrified. Some years later, a mysterious stranger walks out of the silver, asking for Jolly, whom he seems to know. Can one survive the silver? Hoping to find her brother, Jubilee sets off on a dangerous quest, pursued by the man who can control silver. Her journey leads to her discovery of her civilization's stormy past and her own memories of past existences. Although the concept of the hazardous silver remains enigmatic, Nagata's book conjures up a richly realized world in which a truly eerie landscape serves as the vibrant background of a tale of self-discovery and courage in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
Sally EstesCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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