Meredith Sue Willis Libri

Born in a small town in West Virginia, Blair Ellen Morgan yearns for something she cannot name. Inspired by a speaker from the small Christian college in the same range of hills as her home, she joins VISTA to work for a year in an inner city neighborhood in Norfolk, Virginia.

The story takes place on a planet where a group of interstellar colonists have broken down into rulers-and-ruled. Food is difficult to find or produce, and violence and oppression ensue. One small group escapes and tries to establish an alternate way of life based on doing no harm in the new world. The protagonist is Soledad, who has an ability to collaborate with the planet's sentient beings, called yaegers. Her openness to the yaegers offers her group its best chance to prevail against the harsh desert, the difficulty of staying fed, and—worst of all—the growing threat from human enemies.

In this third novel of the Blair Morgan trilogy, Blair and some of her activist friends move to New York City where Blair involves herself in the swirl of political action at Columbia University during the famous student anti-war sit-ins of 1968. At the same time, she works at Bellevue Hospital where one of her patients, a chess playing paralyzed man, becomes the sounding board for her understanding of world affairs and her explorations in love.