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In High Places Harry Turtledove Tor Books © 2005 |
The setting of the novel takes place 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.
Teenage Khadija, daughter of a prosperous family of Moorish business travelers, is unfazed. That’s because she is really Annette Klein from twenty-first century California, and her whole family are secret agents of Cross Time Traffic, trading for commodities to send back to our own timeline. Now it’s time for Annette and her family to go home for the start of another school year, so they join a packed train bound for their home base in Marseilles, where the cross-time portal is hidden.
The bandits attack while they’re crossing the Pyrenees. Annette/Khadija is separated from her parents and knocked out, and wakes up to find herself a captive in a caravan of slaves being taken to the markets in the south. She is in a tight spot. . .
I thought the story was very interesting and amusing. I know that the setting took place in 2096, but the way the author made it sound it felt as though it was made in some medieval time man, many years ago. It has an eerie feeling throughout the story, and there is a lot of suspense towards the ending of the story that even shocked me as the reader. All in all, I thought the story was really good and the author put a lot of thought into writing it and getting the readers’ attention.
~ Josh Gemik, grade 11, Trumbull Career and Technical Center