Gayle Greeno

Three stars, almost four. (Terrible title, though: ignore the title, read the synopsis & reviews.)

This was a pretty absorbing/engaging read, and the setting was very rich. There's the overall culture on earth, the splintering of the nations the amalgamation of the corporations the major & minor religions*; the technology, orbital mechanics, and social culture of the space stations; the culture of the acting troupes (mainly Stanislaus Troupe but others as well); the culture of the show more faith-healing compound.

((*Pro tip: if you're describing the state of global Christian religions, don't forget the Orthodox East!))

Then there's the personal relationship dynamics: within and around Stanislaus Troupe; within the faith-healing family; among the corp-religion handlers. And all the political and personal intrigue.

Then there are the deeply explored themes of embodiment, life, death, living, dying, and killing; with interlocking themes of love, loyalty, and betrayal. This is really what the book is about. Is living as a brain in a box really living? If you want to die, should you be forced to go on living? How do parents, children, spouses, siblings love each other? When does love turn to something else? How many forms of betrayal are there?

Really, this was a very good book. Only two things kept me from giving it four stars:
1) one of the main characters, Glynn, spends too much time being too whiny for me -- not that this was unrealistic for a 15yo boy in his situation, just that it got on my nerves.
2) one of the characters has an extremely idiosyncratic speech pattern that is as much or more about playing with sounds and repetition as it is about conveying meaning. (Greeno does something very similar with the speech of the ghatti in her other books (starting with [b:Finders-Seekers|591805|Finders-Seekers (Ghatti's Tale, #1)|Gayle Greeno|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348358486s/591805.jpg|578550]). It's a very recognizable quirk, and if the character had remained marginal with relatively infrequent dialogue, I would have appreciated it. But she became a sufficiently significant character that talks a lot, and again, it just got on my nerves.

I was especially intrigued by the Little Sisters of Mortality, a Nuevo Catholic religious order of assassins.

Some of the exposition in the beginning was a bit clunky, but it wasn't too bad, and sometimes was slightly clever.

I liked Greeno's ghatti books, but they have a fairly standard fantasy feel. This book was stronger. I think she writes better SF than fantasy, and I'd like to see her write more of it. show less

Wonderful premise - reminds me of Anne MacCaffrey's Dragonriders in many ways. The plot was a bit predictable, but the characters more than made up for it. Language a little too flowery for my tastes.

This is one of those times when I look at the reviews on Amazon and have to double-check that we're talking about the same book. They were so universally positive that it almost made me want to go back and re-read the book to see if maybe I'd missed something. But it's a 500+ page book that I had to force myself to finish, so there's no way I'll be doing that.

On the world of Methuen, there's a sentient alien race called Ghatti, who look like oversized housecats. They can mind-speak among show more themselves, and bond and mind-speak with certain humans referred to as Seekers. A Seeker-Ghatt pair is able to discern truth, so they serve as something like circuit judges in the old west.

When a Seeker is killed and his Ghatt basically loses his mind, it's up to his friend and lover Doyce and her Ghatt Khar to solve the mystery.

There's really nothing new or exciting here. The Ghatts are just too precious, starting with the name. The concept was interesting--both the set-up with the bonded pairs and the mystery, and it did pick up once it was revealed whodunit, near the end, but it was just a chore to read.

I'm sure Finders, Seekers wouldn't have looked quite so dull if I hadn't read it right after Cursor's Fury, but it illustrates some of the comments I made--it's full of way too many characters with oddly-spelled names, and long passages of authorial intrusion--interminable descriptions of things the author wants the reader to know about the fantasy world.

Worse yet, too much of the narrative doesn't really have a point, and just bogs down the story. For example, we learn everything about Doyce's life history (in dreams, no less), and only a small portion of that has any bearing on what happens later.

This is the sort of book that made me stop reading fantasy in the first place. I just don't have the patience to sift through all the extraneous stuff to get to the story. Not my cuppa. show less

Another great story, though the over-description does begin to wear on me and I find myself skimming through sentence after sentence of cumbersome adjectives. The characters remain fascinating, especially the adept characterization of the large cats, ghatti. The main character, Doyce, becomes grating in her almost adolescent angst and melancholy - and I wonder if it's supposed to make the reader think of her as being a 'strong woman' who of course is therefore also unable to love, trust or show more believe in herself without almost constant self-flagellation. Still, the story is gripping and I do love the ghatti! show less