http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1342934...

some nice descriptive passages, but I never quite grasped what was going on - setting too peculiar and characters not interesting enough to be worth following. ( )

[Amy] Alas, I have fallen behind again in my booklogging, and so have managed to forget much of what I might have chosen to say about this book in the weeks since I finished it. So much for resolutions, really.

The book is set in a post-nanoapocalypse world, wherein a technology that had been intended to save the world has gone askew - really only a touch off-true, actually, but it was enough, once carried on long enough - and now Cincinnati (the only city we see in the book; I don't actually know what we are to believe is going on in the others) is stuck in an endlessly-repeating loop of historical and fictional snippets, and the countryside is full of nanoplague and subsistence-level living.

As I have mentioned before, I love post-apocalyptic fiction, though nanoapocalypse fiction in specific generally irritates me due to its technophobic overtones. This one retroactively does not, however, for reasons I shan't detail here because I think they would be spoilery.

We shall leave aside the excessive cutesiness of the protagonist in this search-for-truth being named Verity.

In any case, it's a good book - the more so when one considers that it is a) a first novel and b) over 20 years old, neither of which were particularly apparent upon reading. The various author blurbs compare it to Bear's Blood Music, against which I believe it holds up favorably. Certainly she seems better at telling a story than Bear is. Recommended.
[ http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/ze... ]

Bee an art lover.

One serious problem with this book, it reads like a padded chunk of a series, and apparently this is a series. It is very, very slow.

Runaway type technology has changed a lot of things, and the protagonist of the piece lives in a paranoid type of religious community trying to stay uninvolved.

Needless to say, she has to get out of there, and heads for Cincinnati for a painstakingly dragged out revelation or two. Cincinnati presumably is nicknamed the Queen City.

Not interesting enough to want to read several more books.

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2007/08... ( )

Not bad, although the exposition took until the end of the book and was painfully slow. I read it because: 1) I like the Shakers, 2) I lived in Cincinnati for a couple of years, and 3) the heroine's name is Verity (which name I adore). I didn't like it enough to want to read the sequel. ( )