Time, Like an Ever-Rolling Stream. Holy Ground Trilogy, #2

After the critical and popular success of The Ragged World, Judith Moffett returns to the future with this moving tale of the Hefn occupation of Earth and how it affects Earth's people--two youngsters in particular, Pam Pruitt and Liam O'Hara, math-prodigy students at the Hefn Humphrey's Bureau of Temporal Physics.  On vacation from the Bureau, Pam and Liam visit Hurt Hollow, a place on the Kentucky shore of the Ohio River once homesteaded by a landscape artist and his wife. Orrin and Hannah Hubbell had lived there in harmony with the Earth, gardening and fishing, raising goats and bees, doing without modern conveniences-a lifestyle much approved of by the Hefn. The tradition at the Hollow continues, and the teens are drawn into it. The prospects of living peacefully seem distant for Pam and Liam, who must find peace both with the Hefn Directive and with themselves. But shattering events that befall them en route to Kentucky, and at Hurt Hollow itself, mirror the ways in which their bond with their alien teacher will ultimately avert a global disaster and drastically alter the course of their own lives. Time, Like an Ever-Rolling Stream is a remarkable novel by a writer able to imagine all this and make us care about it.