The year: 2068. The place: Earthlight Lunar Colony, an international melting pot of scientific discovery and global tensions. Population: 228 adults -- and 42 kids. Fifteen-year-old Damon Cole, who's just arrived on the moon, is one of the first students at the new Earthlight Academy. It's tough being the new kid -- but it's even worse when your mother is your teacher. And when your father is Chief Administrator of the entire colony, that's really asking for it. Damon just wants to kick back and fit in. But soon he's drawn into the life of a pretty girl named Lise, and her abusive boyfriend. Can he avoid being drawn into a deadly fistfight at the top of the lunar dome? And if so, will he be ready for the terror that's coming -- from the adult world?

Damon Cole:
He's the new kid on the satellite. Level-headed, for the most part, Damon is just hoping to find his place in his new surroundings. Not just an outsider, but son of the new boss and the new teacher. Talk about pressure.

Lise Doure:
Pretty, popular, yet oddly reserved. She sympathizes a bit with Damon because her family's been on the moon for a comparatively short time—only three years—and she can remember what it was like to be the new girl.

Xan Chiang:
A very forceful, popular kid in the colony. He's relatively broad-shouldered and muscular, though thin from the lesser gravity. Xan was born on the moon and considers it his only home, and he has strong dislike for kids born on Earth, who he refers to as "Weeders."

Aaron Cole:
Damon's father, the newly installed Chief Administrator of the Earthlight colony. A career politician, prone to dressing in suits, he's a large and imposing figure. Aaron is stern, but very warm and human with his family. The colonists distrust Cole as a political appointee and see him as a wheeler-dealer or, at times, an outright liar.

Leyla Cole:
Damon's mother, founder and sole teacher at Earthlight Academy, the kids' newly formed school. Slight, pretty, and willowy, but with an iron will, Leyla is British, which makes her an oddity on the moon. England is not a partner in the Earthlight program, having sworn off manned spaceflight decades before.

Writer Stuart Moore has taken some fairly universal themes of adolescence—being the new kid at school, abusive relationships, self-esteem issues, bullying, authority figures—and deftly placed them against the exotic backdrop of outer space. But instead of overshadowing the drama, the high-stakes setting of the first colony on the moon only serves to ratchet up the tension, and makes the trials and tribulations of Earthlight's characters all the more riveting.

Add to this, illustrator Christopher Schons' stunning artwork—vividly portraying not only the human elements of the story, but also rendering the architecture and science of the moon colony with amazing realism—and you've got one gripping read.

The story of Earthlight is easily relatable and absolutely fantastic all at the same time. Not an easy task, but one pulled off with aplomb by Moore and Schons.

~Bryce P. Coleman, Editor