Protagonist Zianno Zezen is a Meq boy whose twelfth birthday arrives as the novel opens in May of 1881. His parents are tragically killed as their train runs off a demolished bridge. With their dying breaths, Zianno’s parents provide him with clues to his true nature. He is given a magical stone, and told to guard it with his life. Oh, yeah. And his mother tells him to find someone named Sailor. He’s promptly rescued from the wreckage by Solomon, a Jewish traveling businessman who takes him to St. Louis.
This sets the pace for the entire narrative, one that quickly becomes irritating. Cash’s characters impart earth-shaking secrets as they lay dying, answer questions with other questions, and race off across the globe on epic quest after epic quest, based on the strength of one cryptic clue. But I guess if I had all the time in the world, I’d do the same.
Case in point: Zianno\'s search for Sailor takes him on a journey through Africa that spans years. When he returns to St. Louis, Sailor is brought right to his door by Solomon. WTF, over?
Even if I were immortal, if my wounds healed quickly and I never got sick, if the passage of time meant nothing to me, being led on a wild goose chase for nearly a decade across the burning deserts of the Sahara after a 12-year-old child named Sailor, only to find him sitting on my front doorstep would probably piss me off.
Cash does a great job of conveying time and capturing the changing era, but I thought he was too caught up in subtle mystery for mystery\'s sake, and I was dragged too far, too long in pursuit of revelations that weren\'t, well, that revelatory?
Still, I liked it enough to order the sequel from Amazon. (Hey, I need the closure!) 3/5
THE RATING: FIVE STARS