Ambolaja: Into the Light, Amalie Rush Hill, Publish America, 2005, $24.95

Is it possible to broach the veil that separates our different lifetimes, not just in our minds, but in our bodies as well? For Jericha Miller it is. She finds herself unwittingly leaving the barely balanced modern world and being led somehow into a hidden society which has no machines or even electricity. It also has few laws and no religions, just full expectations of personal responsibility.

The inhabitants of this hidden world had forecast her arrival and called her Ambolaja – the bringer of change. After establishing herself in this new world and beginning to think of it as her true home, she also feels an intense compulsion to return to her original place to fix or finish something. So leaving her husband and new friends, she ventures back from whence she came to learn that back there four years has gone by and that her ex-husband has been falsely imprisoned for her disappearance. Jericha’s sudden reappearance, of course, gains his immediate release from his incarceration, so she now endeavors to return to her simple, honest world.

Instead, Jericha now finds herself in a city far in the future where the full impact of the abuses of our today’s societies have settled in. Unbreathable air, horribly mutated people, a government now solely operated by big corporations, well protected from the uninhabitable outside by steel walls. She manages to escape from this hell, planting the seeds of rebellion as she does.

Returning home, she learns that ten years have passed and her husband has remarried, dealing her another crushing blow. She eventually accepts this change and encounters a new man from yet another time who enters this world.

Ambolaja pushes the readers to re-examine their own ideas about the linearity and regularity of time and the interconnections to the allness of life. Visit

–David Moyle

from Reader’s Choice September/October 2007 New Connexion