Catch the Lightning

Catch the lightning / Catherine Asaro.— New York : Tor, 1997, c1996.
309 p. ; 18 cm.
(Saga of the Skolian Empire ; 2)
ISBN: 0812551028

813.54

1. Alternative histories (Fiction). 2. Cyborg – Fiction. 3. Heredity, Human – Fiction. 4. Los Angeles (Calif.) – Fiction. 5. Love stories. 6. Mayas – Fiction. 7. Mexican Americans – Fiction. 8. Science fiction. 9. Skolian Empire (Imaginary place) -- Fiction. 10. Telepathy – Fiction.

Tina Pulivok, a seventeen-year-old chicana of Maya Indian ancestry, meets the love of her life on a street corner in Los Angeles in 1987. He’s tall, dark, handsome, and projects a sense warmth and affection. He thinks she’s beautiful. He’s just out of this world. He does speak with a very strange accent, whether he’s speaking Spanish or English. And when she asks him, he claims to have been on his way to a diplomatic reception in Washington, when he got lost. And why would he be going to a reception dressed like the member of a gang? Oh this wasn’t his dress uniform; he’d left that back on his spaceship until he got his bearings. Tina figures he’s into some kind of role-playing game. In fact, Althor is not just out of this world; he’s from another universe, one in which Jamaica did not become the fifty-first state in 1981, one in which California was part of the United States of America, and one in which he is the target of a high level assassination plotted by members of his own government.