This book had a lot of potential and got me pretty excited about the story in the beginning. Unfortunately it couldn’t follow through for me and it felt to me like it had turned into a romance/fantasy novel for teenagers.
A woman prays to a dark god and receives a gift and a curse. Part of this gift/curse is the stopping of her aging process, and she lives for 300+ years. The mechanics of this gift/curse are explained clearly, and I appreciated that the author gave us the rules of the game early on and was careful not to break them.
The author also hints at an enormous scale – the main character talks about all the time she spent in various (exotic) places, hanging out with Hemingway, etc. However these places and people are only name drops and I think a big opportunity was missed here. This was a long book but most of it was spent in just two eras, and the book feels like an empty shell because of it.
Another thing that bothered me was that the 300+ year old character didn’t really have much more wisdom than anyone else – all of the time and the ability to float invisibly through time but not much in the way of mental development.
So that together with a long romantic interlude involving someone else with a gift/curse made this book a disappointment for me.
Next I am reading The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.
