Synopsis

It’s Baput’s 12th birthday. The battle begins today.

In three years, Baput will succeed his grandfather as Akash, the ruler of the known universe; a tiny, stone-aged village of green-skinned pomegranate famers. If he lives. One can never be sure, in a world attacked every three years by ravenous flying predators.
This time is different. The Akash takes his family to the Holy Cave, where he has discovered a mysterious weapon that might turn the tide. Instead, it transports the royal family to a pomegranate farm in present-day California, where they find themselves powerless and ignorant. When Baput and the Akash try to meditate, the internet floods their primitive minds.

Jerry Musik, also twelve, is heir of the Look’N Up Pomegranate Ranch, thanks to the grace of one good man who plucked his great-grandparents out of the hoard of destitute farm workers displaced by the dust bowl. Jerry could have also inherited the Look ’N Up gene, a misplaced left eye socket, cocked up and to the left, which visits one Musik in every generation. It spared Jerry and his dad, Elmer, but his Uncle Patrick and 10-year-old cousin, Belinda, share the deformity.

Knowing how this world treats people who look different, and desperate for help, Jerry’s parents hire the green, undocumented aliens and hide them for three years until the portal might open again. Warm friendships form as the two families explore each other’s cultures in a richly woven story of religion vs. science; theocracy vs. democracy; women’s rights; racism; marginalization; castigation and the shocking cultural and psychological effects of living in a completely isolated society.

But Baput’s hardworking family aren’t the only ones who came through the portal. The predators have followed their prey, and are hiding on the farm, waiting to attack an unsuspecting Earth. It will take the diverse talents and skills of both families to defeat them. Can they do it quietly, while the monsters hibernate, or will a battle erupt, exposing the world to the monsters, and the gentle, green-skinned aliens to the world?