The Suldonon

The Suldonon is a fantasy story about a teenage boy named Oliver Curtain who lives in northern Maine. Seeking geology specimens for a science report, Oliver makes a bicycle trip into a rural township that lies at the fringes of the Great North Woods. While rock hounding in the shadow of a mountain, our hero encounters a girl he knows from his high school class. She is not a friend of Oliver's, as the two students come from different social circles, but after a brief conversation they...
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The Suldonon is a fantasy story about a teenage boy named Oliver Curtain who lives in northern Maine. Seeking geology specimens for a science report, Oliver makes a bicycle trip into a rural township that lies at the fringes of the Great North Woods. While rock hounding in the shadow of a mountain, our hero encounters a girl he knows from his high school class. She is not a friend of Oliver's, as the two students come from different social circles, but after a brief conversation they agree on a partnership that may enable them both to get a higher mark on their pending presentations.The girl's name is Lillian French, and she proposes the aforementioned partnership. It is a collaboration that leads her and Oliver into an abandoned cave under a derelict cabin. While in pursuit of specimens, a harrowing mishap causes the pair to become lost under the mountain. When, by the narrowest of margins, they emerge from their subterranean adventure, they find themselves in a world that is outwardly familiar, yet profoundly different than their rural hometown.Before the frazzled companions can make a plan of action, they are swept up in the dangerous political currents of the alien world. As the two American strays scramble desperately to keep ahead of malevolent forces, the pair gets separated. Seemingly lost to each other, the Mainers move further apart and into the respective spheres of two antithetical economic systems.As our lost protagonists struggle to survive and to better understand their newfound environs, indigenous conflicts over monetary policy cause a continuing cascade of unforeseeable perils. At last, half-ignorant and otherwise instructed only by their scrapes and escapes, both teens must choose sides as two competing ways-of-life hurtle inevitably toward open war.