Pucker - Melanie Gideon

Melanie Gideon's Pucker centres on Thomas Quicksilver, a seventeen year old who has spent most of his life with only his mother and a small number of close friends owing to the fact that he was badly burned on the face as a young child. To his cruel school fellows he's known as "Pucker". Thomas' mother tells the future for her clients from her sickbed, where she spends nearly all of her time. What none of Serena's clients, nor Thomas' best friend, Patrick, knows however, is that Thomas Quicksilver has more in his past than the trauma of a childhood accident because he and his mother were once Isaurians. They lived in a world where technological advances have deliberately not been made and where every step of every person's life is foretold by the Seers - not just the cataclysmic events such as blizzards or earthquakes, but daily occurrences such as avoiding a street with a large pothole in it that could twist an ankle, or predicting what a family will have for dinner the following week. For Serena and her husband (also a Seer) the calm, predictable life of Isaura wasn't enough and they wanted Thomas to have a normal life, one filled with love, desire, regret, and the unknown.

Serena takes Thomas to Earth to begin a new life, free from the safety and monotony of Isaura. But Serena discovers that she can still foresee the future on Earth - and her gift is much stronger here than it ever was in Isaura, so much so that she can foresee the future of all living things, not just people as she could in Isaura. Her only hope to save her life and her sanity, is for Thomas to return to Isaura to recover her Seerskin, the second skin which gives a Seer in Isaura the ability to foresee the future. Serena hopes that if Thomas can find her Seerskin, which was flayed, it will dampen her ability to foresee the future on Earth.

For Thomas to achieve his mother's goal, he will have to return to Isaura as one of the Changed - humans whose lives are so bad that they are offered the chance of redemption in Isaura. They pass through to Isaura via a portal in America and are healed of whatever makes them ill, then become slaves to Isaurians. Unfortunately, Thomas is quickly sidetracked by his newly healed, gorgeous, face - and by Phaidra, a beautiful and rebellious young woman who knows there's more to the Changed than the Isaurians will admit. So then it becomes a question of whether Thomas will get his act together sufficiently to locate his mother's Seerskin and get it back to her in time (with the knowledge that he will lose his beautiful face when he returns to Earth), or will he give in to his hormones and remain in Isaura ?

Pucker is also available from Amazon.com.