Shannah Jay

I found this book fairly slow starting and took a while to get into it.
However, it got to the stage where I was looking forward to getting home from work to read a few more chapters, which earns it 4 stars from me.

I found the central premise interesting enough:
Galactic confederation is judging whether (relatively) primitive cultures are capable of overcoming their "belligerent" nature and earning membership.
Two warring societies on the same planet send peace-negotiating envoys to the galactic representatives but are really only interested in faking peaceful intentions to gain whatever strategic advantages they can over their enemies.
The galactic representatives are well aware of this, and it soon becomes apparent that a genuine peace is their only acceptable option and the representative envoys are being individually tested and their whole society being judged on their performances.

Although I was expecting a lot of subterfuge, double crossing, etc, in the end there were no real surprises - no real twists or dramatic changes of direction and the conclusion was fairly obvious from early on, with just a few minor details of how the main character's personal situation would end up being unknown until the end.
… (mehr)

Ran out of books in Christchurch and picked this up at an op shop. It's the second book in a series so I met our group of questing heroes in the middle of their adventure, apparently having found a place of brief respite while fleeing the evil cult of the serpent. But the safe place isn't quite what it's cracked up to be so they soon find themselves moving on. Meanwhile, on an orbiting space station, things are going badly wrong.

A funny thing happened as I was reading the space station sections - no sooner had I begun to think that the villain of these episodes was becoming cartoonishly evil than a character mentioned the same fact and speculated that there was a plot-related reason for it. Clever writing.

The book did have some significant flaws though. The heroes are a religious cult in their own right, and have powers granted to them by their god. One of those powers is prophesy, which is cool, except every time the characters are in some kind of bind, one of the prophet characters will say with 100% certainly "Oh, it'll be tough, but we'll come out okay". So no suspense. We know the characters are going to succeed.

They are also hypocritical, and I don't think it's intentional on the part of the author as a friend I discussed the book with suggested. During their travels our heroes come across a village where there's a shortage of women, so the few females who live there are passed around and forced to breed. Shitty, and depicted as such.

However, the main character and leader-cum-priestess of our group freely admits that their religion practiced selective breeding to encourage strong gifts. A member of their group is also pregnant from rape, and stated to be "a child" (her age was never outright stated), yet when she asks for an abortion she is scolded for being selfish and given the cold shoulder by everyone until she agrees to carry the child to term. One of the male characters, despite being in a committed monogamous relationship, had been shared around multiple women in order to breed more gifted children. While his feelings on the matter are not mentioned, his wife was certainly not too happy about it.

So both sides practice forced breeding, mandated sharing of partners and arranged marriages, but only one is evil because of it.

I did like the strongly female cast and the fact that pregnant women and mothers played an active role, although I kept raging at the characters to put the damn babies in a sling instead of just carrying them in their arms on long journeys. And my least favourite trope cropped up - the old "these babies are boring let's age them up". C'mon, you committed to having kids in this story, now you gotta live with it!

Overall, a fine read if you're willing to not think too hard about it. Mildly intrigued to read the other books to get the beginning and end of the story but I probably won't make a huge effort to search them out.

… (mehr)