Dazzle of Day

Nearly 10 years ago, Gloss published a critically acclaimed mainstream novel about American pioneer life in the 1890s, The Jump-Off Creek. For her equally fine second novel, she ventures into SF and the future, writing of interstellar pioneers who leave a ravaged Earth to spend generations in space seeking a new home. The voyagers are Quakers--more often female than male--with a predominantly Latin American culture, and they speak Esperanto. Their space-ark's environment is maintained by Green agriculture, and their new world, when at last they reach it, turns out to be chilly, marginally fertile and subject to earthquakes. Gloss skillfully evokes a family saga in relatively few pages, investing her story with an abundance of detail, expressed in rich language, that brings people and places, crops and crises, to life. This is a novel of ideas, in the utopian tradition, but every idea finds its way to the reader through one or more characters. Intelligent and entertaining, it demonstrates why Gloss was a recent winner of a Whiting Writer's Award. (June)