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moonlily115's review
adventurous
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.5
caedocyon's review
2.0
Finished. Meh. My first impression ("lots of keymash fantasy words that run together") stands. I probably would have loved this as a teen, but I've kind of fallen out of the fantasy habit. This is sci-fi in aspiration only: the setting, the attempt at a study of what it means to be human vs. alien.
I hate when people try to construct a purposely inhuman alien civilization and then make stereotypical decisions about things like clothing and cephalization. "Indelible scent" was a start, but my first instinct is that it wouldn't work---doesn't anything that smells have to be volatile? (I have to do more research on this.) I do like that hrinn didn't distinguish between human and flek, as far as "bad-smelling aliens" goes.
There are quite a few female characters who get a hand in their own fates, but one of the supposed two main characters, Mitsu, doesn't get to do one single, solitary useful thing. She's basically a plot device, and it's annoying that we're supposed to care about her. Every time the scene shifted, I found myself hoping it wouldn't be back to her.
One last persnickety thing: the way non-native speakers failed to understand speech didn't feel right. It was like a machine translator failing for random words, where my own experience is that you can usually pick out basic vocabulary but aren't sure about the tense/declension, or alternately you can understand the grammatical context but don't know the meaning of the word. If it was supposed to be an artifact of the artificial way Heyoka and Mitsu learned the language, it would have been nice to expand on that.
So for my own reasons I didn't find this book very interesting, but that's not to say other people wouldn't.
I hate when people try to construct a purposely inhuman alien civilization and then make stereotypical decisions about things like clothing and cephalization. "Indelible scent" was a start, but my first instinct is that it wouldn't work---doesn't anything that smells have to be volatile? (I have to do more research on this.) I do like that hrinn didn't distinguish between human and flek, as far as "bad-smelling aliens" goes.
There are quite a few female characters who get a hand in their own fates, but one of the supposed two main characters, Mitsu, doesn't get to do one single, solitary useful thing.
Spoiler
Wentworth even had Mitsu scheme to sabotage the flek at the end, and then nothing came of it.One last persnickety thing: the way non-native speakers failed to understand speech didn't feel right. It was like a machine translator failing for random words, where my own experience is that you can usually pick out basic vocabulary but aren't sure about the tense/declension, or alternately you can understand the grammatical context but don't know the meaning of the word. If it was supposed to be an artifact of the artificial way Heyoka and Mitsu learned the language, it would have been nice to expand on that.
So for my own reasons I didn't find this book very interesting, but that's not to say other people wouldn't.
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