The Einstein Sisters Bag the Flying Monkeys

It's thirteen days before the 2000 election in Florida. Can Albert Einstein's three brilliant great-great-granddaughters save America from an eight-year-long catastrophe? Home-schooled Maxine, Norma and Tina's parents mysteriously abandon them to join a neo-conservative conspiracy plotting a disastrous war in Iraq if George Bush steals the presidency. Immediately the sisters find themselves trapped inside ex-wrestler Reverend Moriah Godley's authoritarian Ten Commandments high school. He has brainwashed his Christian students to fly the Jewish girls to Israel to die in the Battle of Armageddon so Christians can ascend to heaven in the Rapture. Soon Shepherd's Vale School's memorial ceremony for a sailor killed by terrorists attracts a star-studded cast of neo-conservative politicians including Bush, Cheney and their top henchmen. The Einstein sisters dub the visitors "Flying Monkeys" after the death squad in The Wizard of Oz. Jesus of Nazareth is so alarmed that the false prophets' support for nuclear war will become a self-fulfilling prophecy that he returns to earth to inspire his youthful Christian followers. The book's powerful young heroines and their classmates unite to bag their prey in a spectacular climax that surpasses the uplifting spirit of Dorothy's melting of the Wicked Witch and return to Kansas. The book is both political fantasy and satire, but it deals seriously with political, social and religious themes from international terrorism, the coming wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Christian Zionism and its hidden agenda, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the persecution of gays in the name of religion.