It's Baput's 12th birthday. In one more 3-year cycle, he will replace his grandfather as Akash, the absolute ruler of the known universe: a stone-age village of green-skinned pomegranate famers. If he lives. One can never be sure, in a world attacked every three years by ravenous circadian predators. The battle begins today,
This time, instead of sheltering in the Great Hall while the men fight the flying beasts with sticks and slings, the Akash takes his family to the Holy Cave, where he has discovered an ancient weapon that might turn the tide. Instead, it transports the holy family to a pomegranate farm in California, where they find themselves powerless, penniless and ignorant. When Baput and the Akash try to meditate, the internet floods their primitive minds.
Jerry Musik, also 12, is heir of the Look'N Up Pomegranate Ranch, thanks to one good man who plucked his great-grandparents out of the horde of displaced, destitute farmworkers who fled the dust bowl. He could have inherited the Look'N Up gene, too, a misplaced left eye socket, cocked up and to the left. It spared Jerry and his dad, but his uncle and 10-year old girl cousin share the deformity.
Desperate for help and knowing how this world treats people who look different, the empathetic family hires the oddly colored, undocumented aliens and hides them for three years until the portal opens again and the predators emerge from hibernation to attack an unsuspecting Earth.
Warm friendships form as the two families explore each other's cultures in a richly woven story of religion vs. science; theocracy vs. democracy; women's rights; racism; otherization; castigation and the shocking psychological effects of living in a world with no otherwhere.
