'Unwind'

To end the Heartland War, a second Civil War between Pro-Life and Pro-Choice forces, an accommodation was reached. According to the new Bill of Life treaty, "human life may not be touched from the moment of conception until the age of 13," but at that age and until the child turns 18, he or she may be retroactively aborted.

Connor's parents are tired of his fighting in school; Risa is a ward of the state and is deemed not sufficiently talented to warrant taking up bed space until her 16th birthday; Lev is a "tithe," a child set apart from birth by his religious parents to sacrifice himself for others. Lev doesn't want to escape his fate, but Connor and Risa do and when they have a chance to make a break for it, they almost accidentally take him along. As the three teens make their way through the Unwinds underground, their circumstances, their talents, their fellow refugees, and their own painful thoughts raise a host of moral, ethical and political issues that become inseparable from the high-octane action and desperate suspense of the story.

One would imagine such a scenario to be far-fetched -- that it would be impossible for parents or society to discard their children just because they had become troublesome or seemingly superfluous. But perhaps Shusterman's point is this: The child is father to the man; the bud becomes the flower.

Christopher Robbins's "Apples are from Kazakhstan: The Land that Disappeared" is a deceptive little volume, compact and diminutive on the outside, but rich and densely textured on the inside.

Robbins decided to write this book after he met a man from Arkansas who was on his way to Kazakhstan to marry a widow he met through the Internet. When the two parted ways, the Arkansan's parting shot was "apples are from Kazakhstan."

Intrigued, Robbins followed up, and the rest is history, in more ways than one. After seeing the remnant trees of the original apple cultivators (Wouldn't he rather see tulips?), Robbins moves through the time and space of one of the world's most intriguing countries, from the Polygon (site of open-air H-bomb testing during the Cold War), to possible sources of the grail legend, to the destruction of the Aral Sea and the herder culture by an obtuse Soviet system.

Suspense abounds as well: Will Robbins have to actually eat the sheep head? Will he and the distinguished antiquities restorer survive an icy ride in the ancient Lada with the nearly treadless tires? Given unusual access to Kazakhstan's President Nazarbayev (an extraordinary but virtually unknown world leader), Robbins gives his readers, in stylish and engaging prose, a panoramic view of where Kazakhstan came from, and where she is going.

This is my favorite book of the year so far.

• Laura Wadley is a librarian with the Provo City Library. E-mail her at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it