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A review by mckitterick
In War Times by Kathleen Ann Goonan
4.0
Disclaimer: I had difficutly with all the emphasis on jazz early in the novel. I nearly put the book down, because I'm not much of a jazz fan. But the promise of the rest of the book kept me going through the epic story that was to come, and all that jazz plays a part in forming the over-arching metaphor of the story.
The real payoffs of the novel are two-fold: First, witnessing the unfolding of events set up early in the book over several decades; and second, the family story. Thus, much of the payoff is similar to the kinds of reward we get from reading family epics in other genres, but this is a real SF novel where the SFnal material plays an important part in the central story as well as in the lives of the main characters' family and friends.
I suggest that you'll appreciate the novel once you begin to settle into it past the mid-way point, and that it'll grow on you much like the HD1....
The real payoffs of the novel are two-fold: First, witnessing the unfolding of events set up early in the book over several decades; and second, the family story. Thus, much of the payoff is similar to the kinds of reward we get from reading family epics in other genres, but this is a real SF novel where the SFnal material plays an important part in the central story as well as in the lives of the main characters' family and friends.
I suggest that you'll appreciate the novel once you begin to settle into it past the mid-way point, and that it'll grow on you much like the HD1....