In the Circle of Time

The mist gathered slowly, just a faint coolness and dampness around the stones. . . Then Robert noted the silence. . . fog blanketed the ground within the circle of stones. Jennifer was just a gray shadow of herself, still digging down toward the hidden slab of rock. The coldness of the fog soaked into Robert and he suddenly wanted to push the soil back into the hole he had dug, but the cold seemed to have reached his brain and he had no more power over his thoughts.In this compelling time-slip novel, a girl and a boy from the present day are carried through the Circle of Time to the twenty-second century. There they are caught up in the struggle of a peace-loving people trying to protect their simple and humane way of life from the assaults of a barbaric mechanized society who would conquer and enslave them. Through rich layers of time and meaning, Margaret Anderson has woven an intriguing tale in which the present becomes the past and the future is now. When the book was first published in 1979, it was well ahead of its time for young adult fiction in dealing with climate change as a significant problem—a theme that has since produced a genre known as “cli-fi.”