Going Home by Kim Welsman

Going Home is a medium length book set in the future, about 300 years from now in what seems to be North America, although the exact location is quite vague. Imposing names like the Lakeshore District are used. The main character is a woman named Lyrissa. She is hired by a man named Jenkins who works for the Queen to track down an object (I'll let you read the book to find out what it is). The person who supposedly has this object in her possession is a mysterious woman named Peggy. Lyrissa makes several inquiries with different people before she discovers Peggy's whereabouts. Although apparently not a drug addict, she takes pills called zyloftin that give her the power to get into other people's minds and to relax her and tame her anxiety. Peggy seems to be involved with what is known as the Agency, a heinous organization led by a man named Mitch Christie whose office is located in an immense building. More than just finding the object, Peggy ends up helping Lyrissa with her fears and troubled childhood. In fact, Peggy has powers much stronger than Lyrissa's and does not have to induce them with drugs; she made a blind man see again by just laying her hands on him. After Peggy goes home at the end of the book, Lyrissa goes back to her childhood home in the country and comes to terms with the events that kept her from leading a happy life.

Although I recognize certain ideas and concepts in this book that remind me of H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury and George Orwell, Kim Welsman has managed to establish her own style and carry the reader away with her. She has an excellent command of register: dialogs between people who work at a diner are colloquial and informal, and instructions given by important figures are formal; aliens are stiff sounding, and they don't use contractions. I was intrigued by how the past and the present, the familiar and the strange are interwoven in Going Home. A Victorian house will vie with a hovercar and aliens, making for an entirely new environment sculpted by the author. What I loved about reading this book is how vivid the imagery is. This is important because the author is describing machines and concepts that do not exist, and if they are not well-described, they are very difficult to conceive of. All of this aside, I was touched by how emotional the story was. I felt like I was right there, sitting next to Lyrissa in her hovercar, feeling what she felt, going where she went. Indeed, the author manages to establish a bond between the reader and Lyrissa through carefully crafted sentences.

There are several reasons to read this book. If you are a science-fiction devotee, you can't afford not to read it, because no matter how many science-fiction books you've read, this one will throw you a curveball, take you for a ride, and make you see fantasy the way you never have before. If your interest is fiction about women, you will greatly benefit from the power that Kim Welsman imbues in both Lyrissa and Peggy. If you want to see what life may be like in the future, and what people in the future think about life in the 20th century, this book will give you an eye-opening picture. Once you finish Going Home, you'll be happy to know that there are total of five books in the Alien Encounters Series. You can download this book from Amazon for only 99 cents.