In High Places
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- 2,99 €
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- 2,99 €
Descrição da editora
In the twenty-first-century Kingdom of Versailles, the roads are terrible and Paris is a dirty little town. Serfdom and slavery are both common, and no one thinks that's wrong. Why should they? Most people spend their lives doing backbreaking farm work anyway.
But teenaged Khadija, daughter of a prosperous family of Moorish business travellers, is unfazed. That's because Khadija is really Annette Klein from twenty-first-century California. Now it's time for Annette and her family to return to California for the start of another school year, so they begin a journey to the hidden crosstime portal in Marseilles.
As they cross the Pyrenees, bandits attack. When Annette/Khadija comes to, she's a captive in a caravan of slaves being taken to the markets in the south. Worse, her purchasers take her to an unofficial crosstime portal, a thing hitherto unknown . . . leaving open the question of whether Crosstime Traffic will ever be able to recover her!
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Alternative history maestro Turtledove deals a tad heavy-handedly with the issue of slavery in his third Crosstime Traffic novel (after 2004's Curious Notions). In one alternative time line, the Black Death continued far longer than it did in the "home" time line with the result that Muslims occupy much of Europe, which is made up of small, insular principalities and kingdoms. When bandits in this medieval world capture 18-year-old Annette Klein (aka Khadija the oil merchant's daughter), she's separated from her parents, with no way to return to the home time line from which she and her family originate. Worse, the bandits are slavers who send people into another alternate time line where they're forced to work in miserable conditions. Turtledove convincingly portrays the conflict between Christians and Muslims, but takes less care in depicting male-and-female relationships. Didactic pronouncements on slavery notwithstanding, the book should satisfy its target audience of younger readers.
