The year: 2068 A.D. The place: Earthlight, the first international moon colony. It's a domed complex of cold steel and carbon nanotubes, sterile and metallic, run by ironclad rules and regulations. Population: 228 adults—and 42 kids. Earthlight is a very expensive and controversial project, and life there is tense and difficult. Safety regulations must be obeyed to the letter. And the kids' parents are all under enormous pressure, which both contributes to the burden they place on their children and means they have very little family time in their schedules. So the kids must find their own way most of the time...

And sometimes, they get into trouble—as in the case of a recent catastrophic accident where five adults and three children died. So the U.N. hires Aaron Cole, a new administrator, to oversee Earthlight. Cole's wife, Leyla, is to establish and operate Earthlight Academy, the colony's first organized school—with their fourteen-year-old son, Damon, as one of the first students.

The high-tech, high-stress setting of Earthlight's lunar colony reflects and magnifies the problems of regular kids today. Like their parents, these teens must forge their own forms of survival and cooperation—if they're to succeed in this harsh new 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