The Daughter of the Sea and the Sky

Imagine a world divided into two factions: the land of the believers and the land of reason. The Daughter of the Sea and the Sky uses this new world order to explore the complications of a society stripped of faith. When two young professionals, Jason and Helena, rescue a young girl who has washed in with the tide from the Blessed Lands, they are drawn into a bureaucratic web designed to prevent the infiltration of anyone spiritual. The girl, Kailani, is imprisoned until a sympathetic bureaucrat allows her rescuers to become her legal guardians and accompany her to an out-of-the-way artist colony until she has assimilated into a more reasonable way of thinking. The results are both surprising and heartwarming until a new directive is issued to take her back into custody. Jason and Helena are forced into a desperate plan to prevent Kailani from returning to detention.

Author David Litwack gracefully weaves together his message with alternating threads of the fantastic and the realistic. His characters are genuine and the settings idealistic. The reader will find wisdom and grace in this beautifully written story that will make both atheists and theists pause. Is a mind devoid of faith as zealous as a mind consumed with the Spirit? However, Litwack is a master of details that tend to slow the storyline. Many of the sentiments do not drive the plot. Even though there are several tense scenes, the book does not have the pace of most modern fiction and should be savored for its insight and literary prowess, rather than its plot.