The Summer Queen

Vinge is a fantastic writer, and she proves it over and over in the three books I've read so far in this series.

Does this one suffer from bloat? Hell yes, all three do. But this is one of the few authors that can pull it off, because the stuff buried under the bloat is priceless.

While so events turned out to be somewhat predictable, overall, the ride was worth it.

And for all of you that bitched that the book before this was unnecessary, I hope you read this one and have learned to shut your mouths. This one completely validates World's End.

Bleaker than the first one (Snow Queen), this story reminded me of how Terry Goodkind flays one alive while reading. Vinge really brings one's emotions into play. Helpless anger over the Hegemony's utter arrogance in insisting on merhunts to obtain the water of life. Complete selfishness everywhere. The poor Summer Queen was misunderstood by just about everyone.
Unlike the first book this one does not rally around an Andersen fairy tale. Instead it tells a true story of humanity. One can recognize our own country as the Hegemony, forcing our way into a "backwards" country, taking control, killing off an indigenous species because its blood contains the key to immortality, and introducing technological "things" that snare the natives. And show more oh, the politics involved! show less

Whew, it took me nearly three weeks to read this! That’s unusual for me. For the most part, it wasn’t the fault of the book. I had two weeks of almost non-stop work, with very little down time. More often than not, when I finally sat down to read, some work-related issue would interrupt me and I’d have to put it back down. The third week was better, but still full of work-related distractions. It wasn’t entirely not the book either, though. It did have some slow spots. Combine that with both work distractions and personal distractions and some general restlessness, and there were times when it was difficult to make forward progress. My Kindle edition claims it’s 686 pages, but it took more Kindle page turns for the “real show more page numbers” to advance as compared to most of the Kindle books I read, so the edition these page numbers were based on must have had a miniscule font. The mass market paperback edition appears to be 949 pages.

This is the third book in The Snow Queen cycle. It picks up directly after the first book, The Snow Queen, and the first part takes place concurrently with the second book, World’s End. In many ways the story continues as you would expect, especially if you read the second book. There were some unexpected things though, and I think those were the parts I liked best.

I was least interested in the parts of the story that followed Moon and her family and had most of the expected plot threads. I still didn’t like Sparks, although I don’t think his behavior followed the natural progression I would have expected from the first book. He did do some interesting things by the end, but he still annoyed me as completely lacking in any personality or self-motivation for most of the book. I just really didn’t like him, and I think by this point there wasn’t much the author could have done to turn that around for me. However, I really enjoyed the chapters that focused on some of the new characters. Reede was especially interesting to me, even after I figured out what was going on with him. I tend to enjoy the troubled, ambiguous characters with a mysterious past. I also enjoyed most of the story surrounding a more familiar character, BZ Gundhalinu. Except when he was with Moon or mooning over her, which got tiresome. I especially enjoyed the parts where he was working with Reede.

I liked the end ok, but it felt a little anticlimactic and maybe a little rushed. I don’t know that it actually was rushed, but it felt that way in comparison with the pace of the rest of the story. All the characters were given a little bit of page time so that we’d know what was going on, and aside from a couple plot points that I never bought into, I felt like we had all the answers by the end. It just seemed like more than a few pages were needed to provide a proper wrap-up.

I did mostly enjoy the book, but it was a struggle at times. I think if I’d had fewer distractions, I would have enjoyed it more because I would have made it through the slower parts more easily. I’m rating this at 3.5 stars but rounding down on Goodreads. There’s one more book in the series, but I think I’m going to stop here. I went and checked the book blurb (a thing I usually avoid doing) and it looks like it’s a side story focusing on BZ and set during the first book. I’d probably enjoy it since I liked his character, but going backward in the story timeline doesn’t appeal to me right now and I’m ready to move on to something new. show less

A good sequel to a fantastic book. The timeline and plot have clearly been well thought out. While I enjoyed Snow Queen more, this book was still an excellent read. The ending surprised me, but it was also a rather satisfying one. It's not absolutely necessary to read this if you have read Snow Queen, but if you do, you won't be disappointed.

Its rare that I complain about a book being too long, but I'm going to make that complaint about this work. It is the equivalent of a 19th century Russian novel set in outer space that just goes on and on and on. My copy had a tiny size font, but still ran to over 650 pages.

Still it was a worthwhile sequel to The Snow Queen, meanders and all. We find out what happened on Tiamat, how Moon and Sparks get on, the mystery of the mers, sibyls and Carbuncle is all solved. Though the way they all of sudden figure out FTL travel was rather forced, it did allow readers to find out what was going on other planets of the Hegemony.

Great book & a continuation of the story begun in The Snow Queen. There's one in the middle, World's End, but I never liked it as much - I think I just didn't like the character it explores as much.

This is a character-driven book with not a lot of action. If you're looking for space adventure - look elsewhere. Having said that, the last third of this book is so suspenseful that I almost missed my stop because I was reading it on BART.

Lots of levels and lots of layers. Ms. Vinge really loves her story and her characters and obviously had a great deal of fun creating all the different worlds and political wheels upon wheels. It was fun to visit other worlds and see what else was out there in her universe, but I think I loved most of all show more the bits and pieces of the people of Tiamat roaming around their planet amidst the Hegemony's rubble.

Interesting, engrossing, and emotionally engaging - this whole series is great. show less

Thanks to the introduction of power-packed character Reede Kullervo; a secret society; and ancient history, this book continues the ambitions of the Snow Queen without repeating them. Negatives: the timeline of the book is a bit hard to follow; ten minutes or five years may pass between each chapter. Also, you want to slap both Moon and Sparks for pretty much the whole book. A whiny pair.