The Flight of the Silvers
In this first installment of a projected series (The Silvers Saga), two sisters in their twenties, Amanda and Hannah, are inexplicably transported to an alternate reality—a sort of faux San Diego—after their own world comes (quite literally) crashing down around them. Together with other people from their world, each of them, like Hannah and Amanda, wearing a mysterious silver bracelet, the sisters wind up at a scientific research compound, where Sterling Quint, a temporal physicist, tries to figure out how they got here. The cast is engaging (it includes a 16-year-old Australian boy, a girl who’s been separated from her entire family, and an affable cartoonist), and the author has created an alternate-reality world that is both bewilderingly different and reassuringly familiar. Much of the book is devoted to introducing the characters, their new world, and the strange time-affecting abilities they seem to possess, but there’s also a good story here, as our small group of Silvers start an adventure that will, they hope, lead them to an understanding of what has happened to them. A highly imaginative exercise in world building that also features characters it’s very easy to care about. --David Pitt