February 13, 2025 · Book Review
by Daniele Vaccaro
Ten-year-old Max dies in a hospital bed, a four-leaf clover his mother once gave him clutched against his chest, promising her he’ll find his way back. Grief breaks his parents in different directions: his mother Elizabeth refuses to let go of the belief that he’s still out there somewhere, and his father Paul, unable to bear the loss, takes his own life not long after.
Light-years away, on a utopian alien world called Anturn where children are born from the fruit of a great tree rather than to a mother, a newborn arrives already fussy and strange, and grows into a boy named Sveern who insists, against everyone’s gentle correction, that his real name is Max and his real home is a planet called Earth. The bulk of the story follows Sveern’s long, lonely campaign to get anyone in Anturn’s government to believe him and let him go home, with only one Anturnian child, Blily, willing to take his claims seriously. What Max finds when he finally does make it back to Earth, and what that four-leaf clover turns out to mean twice over, is the story’s real payoff, and it’s worth encountering without it spoiled here.
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