I love this book (and loved reading all the reviews before mine.) She is very anti-religion, pro-environment and very feminist... I have trouble with the latter. Every time I meet a male character who isn't a woman hater I feel like cheering. That's just her way though... So do your best to look past that and just enjoy some futuristic (well it was when it was written) social commentary. ( )

Make sure you like Tepper's brand of feminism before you pick this up, it's about as subtle in this novel as a ton of bricks.

For my part, I was curious. Having heard a lot of "man-hating crap" comments about her The Gate to Women's Country, I read that and thought that it portrayed women as negatively as men and found it a reasonable read.

So, I tried this and found it not really to my taste. She can write well, but her opinions are a bit over the top from my (admittedly male) perspective. As another review I read once said, "It's understandable that women object to being walking wombs. Why, then, should men be walking sperm banks?"

I think I'll try to stick to her "environment-messaging" books and leave the "feminist-messaging" ones in the future. ( )

http://www.amazon.com/review/R1HYK00V... ( )

Tepper has two main issues in her sci-fi/fantasy novels: the environment and women's liberation. This is from the latter category (I prefer the former), and, like many of her books, takes things to extremes and takes extreme measures to solve them. In this case, we might be a bit disturbed by the fact that the extreme scenarios are not so far removed from the present sitation. There are places where women's rights even to leave their homes have been taken away. My big question with this is, I suppose, the ending: what did the main character choose? I also wanted to see just a bit more of when they were in college rather than when they were old, but that's probably partially my own age. ( )

http://www.leftfield.org/~rawdon/book... ( )