This was a rare miss for me in the science fiction category. It started out with a very interesting character – a young woman raised in a religious order devoted to bringing about succor for soldiers in war. The form of that service ranged from spiritual to carnal, and the women of that order are completely mute. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
To read a book with a main character that is mute is a rare experience, and for the most part I liked how the story is told from her view. Also, the idea of two societies at war – one with technology and the other with religion as their basis – was a great foundation to an interesting world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Unfortunately the world is only fleshed out enough to move the story along, and in the end it felt too simple. There are plenty of deep issues here – blindly following religion, love and trust, family ties, slavery and racism. But all of these are dumbed down and treated superficially. I couldn\u2019t buy the changes in the characters as they dealt with these issues, and most of these characters were so one-dimensional that I felt like the author was taking shortcuts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
One character in the book is introduced almost entirely through memories of other characters and also through a strange device – a recording made in the past and replayed in the present. The way it was handled in the book was odd and felt unnatural – and so in the end it seemed like it was crowbarred in an effort to hold together the story. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
OK, I\u2019ll stop here – I could go on, but I think you get the point. Apparently there are two more books in this trilogy, but I don\u2019t think I\u2019ll be continuing the series. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Next I\u2019m reading a cookbook – Food52 Genius Recipes by Kristen Miglore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This was a rare miss for me in the science fiction category. It started out with a very interesting character – a young woman raised in a religious order devoted to bringing about succor for soldiers in war. The form of that service ranged from spiritual to carnal, and the women of that order are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-3463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-TR","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3463\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}