Kathleen Ann Goonan (1952–2021)

The first 60%: amazing and detailed worldbuilding with really original and fascinating ideas. No real story, to be honest, and the female MC is completely passive (in truth just a witness, never a real factor, always pushed around by others), but the sense of wonder more than makes for that. Loved it. The next 20%: endless and boring introspection and inner MC doubts, plus thick packets of infodump served exactly as infodump: the MC, and therefore the reader, simply receives episodes of explanations from the past. Still no story, too many unintersting and unidimensional SC, and too much jazz references, unfortunately (I love blues but really, really hate jazz)... At 80% i couldn't cope with the slugging boredom anymore and gave up. A hugely wasted opportunity of an amazing scifi world...… (mehr)

This is the book that redeems all the books I've slogged through just because my book group was reading them. Because I slogged through this one, too, but it was worth it.

For the most part, I did not enjoy reading it. The beginning, with the neo-Shakers, was interesting and caught my attention; but our heroine leaves home relatively early, and there's a long section in the middle there where things get weird -- like, drug-trippy weird; and even though it's not drugs and there is a science fictional and integral-to-the-story reason for it, it felt a lot like the 70s New Wave SF that was heavily into drugs, which I actively disliked.

But when I was about 60% of the way through, I suddenly realized I was engaged with the story; I cared about the character; and I wanted to see how things would work out.

The book is at once a hero's journey, a coming-of-age story, a post-apocalypse story, a druggie vision quest story, and a story with some very interesting science fictional ideas, and I think it suffered by trying to do all of this at once. It also uses a storytelling strategy in which neither the viewpoint character nor the readers have any idea what is really going on, and everything is bewildering and confusing until gradually, in flashbacks, things start to become clear: in other words, the story is told backwards for much of the book. This seems to be an increasingly popular storytelling strategy which I find increasingly annoying, and I think I finally became engaged when I did because by that point I finally had enough of the backstory to start caring. I will say that the flashbacks are presented in a way that is perfectly integrated into the plot, which isn't always the case.

There were a lot of allusions to literature, music, and drama - I'm sure most of that went over my head as I'm not well enough read in the humanities. I suspect too that the author was deliberately attempting a literary version of jazz in this story, and I don't actually like jazz very much, which probably contributed to the slogging. A significant theme in the book was the relationship between life and art, and the temptation to value art more than life; this reminded me of [b:School of Light|567807|School of Light|Jody Lynn Nye|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1175871868s/567807.jpg|554876], although it's treated much more lightly (ahem) in that book.

There were also a lot of beautifully written sentences and paragraphs -- I kindle-highlighted a *lot* of passages in this book -- which makes me believe that the slogging was the result of an intentional stylistic choice that I don't enjoy, rather than an inability to write; and makes me want to read more by this author. Probably even the next book in this series, although not for a while yet: this one needs time to settle. It will be interesting to see if I like the "Blues" better than I did the "Jazz".

My biggest peeve: although the protagonist is a young woman, and although there are several other important women characters in the book, most of them turn out to be proxies for either the mother, or the wife, of the man whose fault everything is, and a great deal of time is spent on his relationships with them. So for a book with so many women, it weirdly feels like it's actually all about this one guy, his mom, and his girlfriend. Ugh.

There are some good meaty themes here, and some original ideas, both of which were interesting to read about and to think about. Despite how little I enjoyed reading this book, I'm extremely happy to have read it.… (mehr)