Jo Clayton (1939–1998)

I had heard really good things about this book. Unfortunately I did not care for it.

While there was some intensive world building (which I generally like) it was very hard to pick out the details of what was going on for the early part of the book. I stopped to check if there was a glossary in the back or an earlier book. You are expected to understand what is going on with the world and setting already with very little explanation.

There were also some other portions of the book that were deeply unpleasant.

Overall I am fairly disappointed.… (more)

I have a few books in this series lurking on my shelves and I'm not sure I really want to continue with this series now. It's not a long read at around 250 pages but it packs a lot of abuse, both physical and mental into those pages. If I had read it in my heyday of reading sff in my teens a lot of this would have been pretty normal but I'm not up for this any more. As a child Aleytys is an outcaste as the daughter of an outsider, an outsider that happens to be from a powerful alien tribe, giving her lots of bonus powers, and treated badly which probably set her up for accepting the bad treatment at the hands of others. When she finds out that the tribe she's grown up with plan to sacrifice her she runs away, into the hands of a man who rapes her, physically and psychically (even though she's quite a powerful psychic herself) She escapes him only to end up in the hands of a man who demands payment for use of his hut with sex. Now pregnant she ends up being given a powerful artifact that levels up her abilities quite a lot and eventually gets off the planet.
Made me wistfully think of similar plots without all the abuse from Andre Norton.… (more)