FernFolio

By day eleven year-old Edgar labours in the fig groves tending the saplings, picking the highly prized ripe figs, and culling the oldest trees before they can become toxic, poisoning the groves where they stand and those who must touch them.  By night, he rambles the hidden pathways among the fig trees and explores the cliffs.  An orphan, he lines up outside the house of Mr. Ratikan, the grove’s overseer, for a bowl of food each evening and sleeps outside among the trees.
Edgar has but one memory of his early years, that of a kindly man, whom he hopes might have been his father, telling him that he has hidden something for him in the great cliffs that edge the fig groves, something that will come to him at the appointed time.  Because Edgar is a solitary boy, and avidly curious about that something, he takes to climbing the cliffs in secret, since it is forbidden to approach the cliffs for any reason.
Edgar lives on Atherton, a strange world made up of three plateaux.  The highest of the three, the Highlands, is the home of Lord Phineus, the ruler of Atherton and his people.  It is for these residents of the Highlands that Edgar and his fellow workers in the fig groves toil.  If Lord Phineus is pleased with the fig crops, he releases enough water from the Highlands to quench the thirst of those who live in Tabletop; if not, then they go without.  Tabletop is also home to the Village of Rabbits and the Village of Sheep and their inhabitants.  Like those who live in the fig groves, they are expected to send food up to the Highlands in the baskets sent down by Lord Phineus if they want to receive water.
It is Edgar, climbing on the cliffs, who is the first to realize that the Highlands are gradually sinking into Tabletop.  When Lord Phineus and his people learn that they will soon find themselves surrounded by those whom they have kept poor and thirsty, by those whom they have kept deliberately ignorant by banning books and reading, they prepare to beat them down using every means at their disposal.  The people of Tabletop, tired and angry after years of oppression, band together to fight them off and renegotiate their water treaties.
Drive by what he finds hidden in the cliff face, Edgar climbs up to the Highlands and makes friends with Samuel, a young boy who lives in Lord Phineus’ House of Power.  Together, they begin to realize that Atherton, the world they call home, is an illusion, one that is in danger of literally falling apart. Spurred on by this knowledge, Edgar decides to tackle the great climb down onto the lowest of the plateaux, the Flatlands, a dry, arid land inhabited by creatures of nightmare where the boy hopes to find the secret of Atherton.
Atherton: The House of Power is a wonderful adventure that explores man’s unbridled thirst for knowledge and power, and his ability to wield these both as weapons to subjugate others and to benefit humankind.
FernFolio Editor