Clemens sheds new light on how farmers, workers, and women invented strategies to circumvent the parties. Voters learned to monitor legislative processes, to hold their representatives accountable at the polls, and to institutionalize their ongoing participation in shaping policy. Closely analyzing the organizational politics in three states -- California, Washington, and Wisconsin -- she demonstrates how the political opportunity structure of federalism allowed regional innovations to exert leverage on national political institutions.

“I can see you,” hissed the Magnifico. “I can hear you. I can watch your every action.” Lucy pulled the pillow over her head as the nightly whispers began. “The fire awaits all sinners, and their flesh will melt away.” Lucy is a fourteen-year-old girl brought up in a fanatical religious sect that aims to take over the whole world under a deity called ‘the Magnifico’. Children born into the sect are raised in communes headed by ‘Fathers’. For some unknown reason, Lucy and another child, Paul, do not live in a commune, but are strictly raised by so-called ‘Aunt’ Sarah in the ground-floor flat of the Father’s private house. He lives upstairs, and a mystery tenant lives on the second floor. Lucy’s experience of life is limited to the ground-floor flat, prayer meetings and the Magnifico’s school, where children are educated with the aim of infiltrating influential positions in the outside world, working as skivvies or breeding future followers of the Holy Cause. When she suffers humiliation at school assembly, her trust in the religion begins to collapse, and through two school friends she learns some of the secrets of the sect. Her aim is to escape before she is sixteen, when she will either be compulsorily married to one of the Fathers in the name of the Magnifico, or disposed of as unsuitable to further the Holy Cause. She does not know whom to trust and wants to formulate an escape plan, but the matter is taken out of her hands when the Father’s enemies invade his house and she has no choice but to flee...

The year is 2080, fifty years after a large asteroid crashed into the earth, killing 99 percent of its inhabitants and destroying the infrastructure that supported civilization. The few people that survived scratch out a meager existence hunting small animals, fishing, and gathering the few fruits and vegetables that grow wild on the new earth. This is a story that begins in a community of thirty-two living on the shore of a lake. After fifty years of dim semidarkness caused by the smoke, ash, and debris that has circled the earth since the disaster, the sun has reappeared, and more plants have begun to grow, raising hopes for a brighter future. But those hopes are dashed when the fish in the lake that supported them through the dark days grow scarce. Conflict wracks the small community as the leadership insists that they can survive where they are, while the younger generation seeks to explore and rediscover the world beyond. A political miscalculation and a clever ploy by one of the young residents results in approval of an expedition consisting of five members with vastly different skills and conflicting goals. The expedition is wrought with danger, discovery, and surprising plot turns. Meanwhile, death in the community left behind upsets and challenges anything they have ever known. It will take courage, intelligence, strength, cooperation, and faith for any of them to survive.