One of McKillip’s earlier, lesser-known books, this incorporates more science fiction into her fantasy than most of her works do.

The book starts in a remote forest where Kyreol lives with her father. Her mother, who was too curious for her own good, apparently, disappeared 10 moon-flashes ago. (A moon-flash being a unit in time based on a flash on the moon that appears on a regular basis.) At the moon-flash, Kyreol will go through a ceremony that marks her as an adult, become betrothed to a man from a nearby family, and move to his – I won’t even call it a village – home. It’s not far – as much as she knows, nothing is so far: their world is proscribed by the cliff-face on one side and Fourteen Falls on the other side.

But Kyreol, who loves to tell stories about the world and how it works, isn’t ready to settle down and marry, and sew and do other things that women only do. Her father, a shaman, tells her that at her moon-flash ceremony, she will go into a cave behind the waterfall at the cliff face, drink from a white cask, dream of the future, and then place her hand mark on the wall of the cave in red ochre. When she asks about his dreams, whether he ever dreamed of her mother, he replies reluctantly that he dreamed that she saw her mother speaking into a crystal that opened and said her name. It seems non-sensical, Kyreol reflects afterwards, alone beside the river, until she looks up and sees a strange man wandering the forest. He doesn’t see her as he reached into his pocket, pulls out a crystal that opens and he speaks into it.

But her dream, when Kyreol goes to the cave that night, is strange. A white place, full of brightness and hard edges, and she dreams of riding the moon-flash and looking down on her home from above. Then she is betrothed and goes to live with her future husband’s family, sleeping in a hut with his sisters, learning how to cook, giving up fishing (only men fish), learning to care for children. She likes it well enough until her future husband tells her that she should stop telling the children her stories about how the world works. She should live in the world as it is, not dream of it as it could be. “The River is the world,” they tell her. End of story.

For some reason, Kyreol is unhappy. She wants to fit in, to think and behave the way that a good wife – a good woman – would, but she finds herself prone to fits of unhappiness, waking up with fresh tears on her face although she cannot remember her dreams, disappearing into the forest from time to time, and refusing to be found. And she keeps seeing the stranger, watching him from the shadows, as he observes her new family and their rituals. And one night, she confronts him, demands to know who he is and what the thing is that he speaks into, and whether he knows where her mother is. He refuses to tell her and says instead that he will have to go away and she won’t see him again. When he realizes who her mother is, he draws for Kyreol a picture in the dirt, of the round world they live on, and a tiny, tiny river that takes up but a fraction of it. And then he leaves Kyreol with more questions than answers.

Determined to satisfy her curiosity, Kyreol persuades her childhood friend, Terje, to go with her on a last journey before she is married and he becomes engaged, a canoe trip down the river to the end of the earth, Fourteen Falls. They won’t be gone long and Terje will be home in time for his own betrothal.

Instead they end up on an adventure, traveling through lands populated by other people, and ghosts, and death. In each culture that they travel through, they find pictograms, indications that the moon-flash holds a different significance than it did to the people of the river.

This is a beautifully-written book which reminded me somewhat of The Island of Blue Dolphins. Nowadays, people might look askance at the author for the thoughts she chose to project into her jungle characters, who might be perceived of as child-like and simple. But, thinking back to What if We’re Wrong?, you have to ask yourself if the way we see the world would seem as child-like and simple to people with a different perspective than ours. And the book is a young-adult novel, from back in the days when authors wrote young-adult novels that weren’t about dystopian societies brought about by adults, where children are left to fend for themselves to save society.

My husband, for a while, worked with an organization that established high-school debate teams for underserved high-schools. One of the things they did was hold tournaments where those students could compete. I went along with him to those tournaments and helped out, getting teams and judges registered, and managing the administrative paperwork. But I didn’t like listening to the debates; debate-ese is a strange language, not much akin to persuasion, where talking fast to get the most speaking points in is an advantage. One thing I learned, however, was that it was common amongst high-school debaters to chain every argument up to nuclear war. You might start with a topic such as school uniforms and, before you know it, one of the teams has managed to posit that school uniforms leads to nuclear war (and the other, given the chance, would say that not having school uniforms would lead to nuclear war). And this is how I feel about modern SFF for teens.

I found the ending of this book particularly moving: what the moon-flash is and what it comes to mean. This is the first of two books about Kyreol and her pursuit of her curiosity. You will have to find them used, as they are out of print and don’t appear to be on e.