Rebekkah

There was no worldbuilding

Revisado: 01-25-24

This was very bad. Just awful. Is someone paying people to give it five stars? You’d have to pay me at least 500$ to give this a three star rating. The main character is incredibly boring and annoying and doesn’t stop complaining for the entire book. The dragons don’t make sense (why is pen use a dragon rider power? What do magic pens do? Why haven’t they invented mundane pens). It’s just so badly thought out, badly planned and badly written. I was a bit entertained laughing at the terrible sex scenes, but I’m getting my credit back to buy something that the writer actually cared about.

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Light years better than Mirror Dance

Revisado: 09-17-20

I have read (listened to) all the earlier books in this series and enjoyed all but the one directly before this one, Mirror Dance, which I hated so much I considered quitting the series altogether. I gave it one more chance with Memory and it was worth it. This is a return to the old formula as well as (I hope) a prediction for the future. The characters all enter new phases of life, batons are passed, childhood things are put away and it’s all held together by a mystery. Aside from the main plot (which would be a huge spoiler so I won’t say anything about it) prominent subplots include: Ivan scandalized by his mother’s behavior, Simon discovering the wonders of GPS, and kittens for everyone. The pacing is a little slower than LMB’s usual and the story is better for it.

You could probably skip the whole 18 hour slog of Mirror Dance and go directly into this one without missing much. I sort of wish I had.

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Was looking for Bujold but somehow I got Piers Anthony?

Revisado: 09-07-20

I’ve been listening to all of this series lately and so far this is my least favorite installment. The story is disjointed and badly paced, the characters are off-model most of the time, and there’s a lot of molesty parts. Like A LOT. “But she looked twenty,” is actually used as a description of a ten-year-old child more than once. And before anyone helpfully points out that these were clone girls with artificially advanced puberty, yes, I know. Congratulations, we read the same book. My point is that out of an infinite number of ways she could have written this story she chose the path of most molesting. I swear sometimes LMB writes like a teenage boy or your creepy uncle who nobody invites to birthday parties. I like to imagine that this is just a bad fanfic written by Piers Anthony that got mixed up with LMB’s manuscripts and published by mistake. It’s not comfortable to read and it’s even less comfortable to listen to.

To make it worse I actually liked Mark before this book. Sure, he was an awkward, dumb, sexually repressed, and traumatized teenager with serious anger issues, but at some point aren’t we all? He starts this book as grumpy Mark (just the way I like him) and through various situations and traumas (traumas handled with all the finesse of a fat Labrador retriever falling down a staircase) he becomes a better, then worse, then better person before he settles into being an absolutely irredeemable person. I think the book wants me to see him as changed for the better, but I just want stupid, naive space kid back instead of the creepy, actually-in-space Elon Musk knockoff he becomes.

In summary I would like to remove this book from my brain and imagine a better version to replace it with. Maybe AO3 can help—at least no fanfiction could mess it up as badly as this has.

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Much less bigotry than I expected, very refreshing

Revisado: 08-27-20

I listened to this because I’m bored out of my mind social distancing, it was free, and I had seen Lois McMaster Bujold compared to Melissa Scott and Tanya Huff (both favorites of mine). I thought it would be fun, but I braced myself for some problematic nonsense—something like Ethan falling for a woman and everything getting “fixed” ala Vandread—that is not what I got.

What I got was some gay fun and while it is problematic in places, (why are future space people so actively homophobic? What is the point of that, some gay bashing, and some instances of homophobic slurs) it was written in the 80s and people were a little less open-minded then (my brain still catches on space homophobia though, like why have the culture at large be so homophobic?). There are also none of the pointless rape scenes that you usually find in LGBT fantasy written by cishets.

I loved Ethan’s innocence, his unconventional application of religion, and his occasional tendency to be a dishrag. He’s just adorable and, no spoilers, but he does have a male love interest and they adorable even though my brain was screaming “KISS HIM YOU DUMB BABY YOUR BOYFRIEND AT HOME IS A DEADBEAT!” through half the book. Anyways it’s just a fun romp through the implications of gender, religion, sexuality, and asexual reproduction.

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