The Broker

Katherine Millar is eighteen and desperate to be less fat, less swortty, and to have cooler friends. But most of all she wishes she had two parents, instead of one grandma, poll.

Fiona Sweeney wants to do something that matters, and she chooses to make her mark in the arid bush of northeastern Kenya. By helping to start a traveling library, she hopes to bring the words of Homer, Hemingway, and Dr. Seuss to far-flung tiny communities where people live daily with drought, hunger, and disease. Her intentions are honorable, and her rules are firm: due to the limited number of donated books, if any one of them is not returned, the bookmobile will not return.

But, encumbered by her Western values, Fi does not understand the people she seeks to help. And in the impoverished small community of Mididima, she finds herself caught in the middle of a volatile local struggle when the bookmobile’s presence sparks a dangerous feud between the proponents of modernization and those who fear the loss of traditional ways.

Believers in Jerusalem must flee or take the mark of the beast. The lines are drawn between good and evil as God inflicts the first Bowl judgment upon the flesh of those who have taken the mark, while his chosen ones flee to the wilderness, on the brink of Armageddon.