In Terrestrial, Suzy Eynon's fiction debut, seventeen-year-old Daisy wishes to escape the small desert town of Mountain Lake where she's grown up for the "big city," but the closest city is only suburban Phoenix. She finds a message at her high school and though she's not certain she's the intended recipient, she wants to find the sender in hopes of connection. Every message has a sender. Then she starts to see unexplained lights in the desert surrounding the housing subdivision where she lives. A chance encounter during a runaway attempt leaves her more confused about the boundary between real and imagined, seen and unseen, as she questions her assumptions about the town and her location on the physical and metaphorical outskirts of it. Daisy tries to convince others what she's witnessed-in the sky and at school-in this novella inspired by the Phoenix Lights phenomena of the late 1990s. Terrestrial explores themes of isolation, communication, place, and the desert as both a home and a questionably inhabitable environment.
