Tucker Feye's life is just as hum-drum and predictable as most thirteen year old boys living in a rural midwestern town. His Dad is a preacher no less. When Reverend Feye climbs on top of the roof to fix a shingle, the most exciting thing that Tuck could possibly imagine happening would be that his Dad may take a tumble and break an arm, but Tuck is astonished when he hears a yelp from his Dad and runs to the roof to find that his Dad has vanished. After searching all over the place for him, Reverend Feye calmly makes his way out of the surrounding woods with a strange fair haired girl by his side.
To add to the oddness, Reverend Feye's clothes are worn, he has some foreign blue feet coverings and he appears old. He simply explains that he went to town where he found the girl, Lahlia, and that she is from Bulgaria, which explains her silence. The unexplained elements mount as the family sits down for dinner and the Reverend announces that they will no longer say grace since there is no God.
From this point on thing normal is that nothing is certain. The shock of Reverend Feye's denouncing God, yet continuing to preach the same as before, marks the beginning of Tuck's mother, Emily, losing here mind as her red hair quickly fades to white.
Unsupervised, Tucker stays out late and hunts up mischief with the Kraus brothers. A massive rope swing going out over a pond serves as one day's entertainment. Tuck is pushed to be the first to give it a try. As he glides across the water and reaches the highest point in the arch he is startled by the instant appearance of a circular distortion of the surrounding sky. An orb. An entrance into another realm. Twisting and turning in surprise, Tuck is flung back too far smashing into the the tree and blacking out for a moment. As he comes to he instantly inquires as to whether the others saw the same orb. The boys are clueless, but Lahlia seems to know more than she lets on.
Tuck finds out first head what is on the other side of the orb, known as a disko, the next time he comes upon one, as he is transported to another time and place. There are countless transports via the diskos to follow by the Reverend, Tucker, Emily, Lahlia and many others as Hautman takes the reader on a philosophical and sci-fi roller coaster ride that questions what is real, what is time and what is faith, true faith. Though, the story is so intricate that it is easy to find one's mind twisted in recalling how all of the pieces together, this is a riveting physiological soup where crucial moments in history meet with modern men, other beings are encountered, and time means nothing and everything at the same time. The Obsidian Blade is a must-read that will leave you hungry for the next volume in this series, The Klaatu Diskos.
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