A comet is about to strike Earth and a family chosen to board a colonization starship hurries to their ark of survival. This is a similar plot to any number of science fiction novels, with some variations, but in Higuera’s book we are centered on Petra, a girl who comes from the indigenous Mexican culture and who was trained to be a storyteller, a cuentista, by her grandmother. This reinvents the current story into something new and rather wonderful while doing full service to the science fiction elements of the book. The colonists are betrayed by a Collective of humans who want to eradicate their own humanity and who take over the ship and destroy most of the colonists either immediately or over time. Petra wakens out of her stasis-sleep to find her family gone, her future betrayed, and the few surviving original, unaltered children in the position of guinea pigs and expendable explorers in service of the Collective. The summary of the story does not do justice to the book, which is reminiscent of A Wrinkle in Time both in mood and power and in some story elements as well. The rescue of the other children from the monotone culture of the Collective hinges on Petra’s stories, which have the power (as stories do) of reaching through propaganda and ideology to the core of human memory. Like L’Engle’s book, this is young adult writing that anyone can love, and I certainly loved the experience of reading this novel.