Deliverer

I am consistently pleased with this series and this one does not disappoint. It wraps up the third semi-trilogy that follows Bren Cameron, human translator for the Atevi/now Lord of the Heavens, friend and confidant to Atevi Lords and little Atevi children.

The great part of this book is that we finally get a new PoV. Cajeiri, the Son of Tabini, the great-grandson of Ilsisdi, is missing his human friends aboard the spaceship and is semi-successful in fitting in with the rest of the Atevi. He likes tech and is doing all he can to sneak away from his protectors.

What can go wrong?

Truly, even though I've always loved Bren from the start and he's becoming more and more confident in his position in the world, he does make a few mistakes show more along the way. That's all right. That's Bren. He always thinks his way through problems and he's as loyal a companion as anyone could want.

Cajeiri, however, has a big problem on his hands. He's not growing up with all the proper instincts of an Atevi. For one, he's ignoring his instincts and following a code of "friendship", and he doesn't think it's a code for "salad". Things are gonna get really hairy, now. :)

There's more action and intrigue in this one. Quite fun action and intrigue! But above all, it's the world-building that shines. I live here. I belong here. It's a world that lives and breathes and it's a shining example of SF if there ever was one. It only seems to get better with time. Fantastic! show less

i love this Foreigner series, these characters, and every nuance of every formal diplomatic sentence. the dowager Ilisidi has just spent two years on a spaceship. she is no less herself for the experience, though her great-grandson Cajeiri has certainly acquired some interesting human associations and ideas. now she returns to her home planet, quelling a revolution, holding a dinner party (no less fraught with danger), mending the fabric of her own more powerful associations. some culture shock is inevitable. but Ilisidi, armed with new experience she has absorbed but seldom shows, is as formidable as ever. Cajieri, who is so much like her, now has to relearn (among other things) how to be atevi, in a now-unfamiliar world that should be show more home where he is never alone (and also always alone), and always in danger. beautifully done. nobody writes alien thought as perfectly as Cherryh, and that's been true ever since she began to write. and she writes the most realized worlds since Le Guin, every detail of language and manners, culture and politics, part of a seamless whole that we can enter into although it is not human. show less

Book nine in C. J. Cherryh's Foreigner series of novels, which are set on a world shared by a lost colony of humans and an alien species called the atevi, and are full of politics, extra-planetary threats, and uneasy conflicts between traditional atevi culture and technological changes introduced by humans.

I have to admit, I think I'm getting to the point in this series where the slow pace that is so often typical of Cherryh, and is definitely typical of these books, is starting to wear on my patience a little bit. For the first half of this installment, nothing whatsoever happens; it's really all about getting things back to normal after the events of the previous volume. Then when something does finally happen, that something is show more interesting and engaging and occasionally rather exciting, but it also takes a good long while to tell and drags significantly in the middle. This sort of thing can be a little tiring.

On the other hand, I was utterly delighted to discover that, after I complained in my review of the last volume that it was getting old being stuck in one particular character's POV all the time, even when he wasn't a major player in the action, we were finally given a second viewpoint character here. And a great choice of additional POV it was, too: the fresh, engaging, likable voice of someone who was involved in doing at least a few interesting things. More than that, it's an atevi voice (even if that of an atevi highly influenced by humans), which gives us a welcome new window into the minds and culture of the species. And learning more about that culture and those alien thought processes has always been one of the big draws of the series. I'm really hoping we get to see a lot more of this in future volumes. show less

To read more reviews, check out my blog keikii eats books!

Quote:

“Be at ease,” Tabini said, which surely meant it was not bad news in the offing, so he felt free to draw an easier breath. “You cannot think, nand’ paidhi, that your actions are in any sense disapproved. You should by no means seem so ill at ease.”
Did it show that badly? He tried to settle. “One hopes that this is the case, aiji-ma,” he said, “but it was a long voyage, and the aishidi’tat has seen a great deal of disturbance in the interim.”

Review:
Deliverer is a bit of an odd book. I think I rated it so highly only because it rode on the coattails of the previous books. On it's own I was.... a bit confused what the hell the point of it even was. Plus show more the narration wasn't just Bren. No, it was Bren and Cajeiri, the leader of the Atevi's son. Who is eight years old. Effectively transforming this series into an adult/children's book hybrid that somehow manages to mostly work.

In the beginning of the book, the first 40-50 or so percent, we establish that things are slowly returning to the way things were before a civil war broke out across the planet. Things have been changed irrevocably, and it is inherently less safe, but it is returning to normal. Bren is going back to his job, and he is talking to Tabini about things that may happen in the future.

Yet this also sets up the story of Cajeiri, the boy who is very, very confused at what he is. He spent a long time with humans, but he is Atevi. He knows humans better than he knows his own people. He doesn't like how things are down on earth, he doesn't like the changes in his life. He wants things to go back the way they are. And he is trying his damnedest to control his surroundings.

.... And then the rest of the book is Cajeiri has been kidnapped and Bren of all people have to go after him. The human diplomat to the atevi aishidi'tat. (This makes no sense lol). It's a whole bunch of politics, very quickly. and most of the kidnapping isn't even from Cajeiri's perspective, which is where you would expect it to be utilized the most, until towards the end. It just.. didn't seem to matter to the overall series. It didn't tie up the trilogy well. It didn't seem to do anything, and it distracted from other big going ons. I can only assume that it will play some part later on but for now it just seems out of place and a not so good ending to a trilogy. (Future keikii: it did not.)

Still loved reading it, though. Because Cherryh is magic. show less

Better and better and even more so, Cherryh just keeps on delivering the goods with her Foreigner saga. The ninth book - Deliverer, the adventures of a human on an alien world mingling with alien friends and alien enemies - furthers the story of Bren, a diplomat-linguist of the highest order. In fact, he has been endowed with the title "Lord of the Heavens", although in this story, he is entirely planet-bound.

The Foreigner series examines the impact of human space technology on a planet which had an eighteenth-century society, and very alien responses to social groups. There are also the insights into the human responses to this alien society, as seen by not just any adventurer, but a human trained and educated to be the interpreter of show more humans to aliens and vice versa.

Think of it as Star Wars meets Jane Austin. The technology of space-faring humans threatens the stability of a highly structured, formal alien society, while humans simultaneously fail to comprehend the subtleties of that society, and its exceedingly complex tangle of interwoven loyalties. All this gives the writer marvelous opportunities for creating conflict, and raising the stakes.

Like the rest of the series, Deliverer has a complete plot-line which can stand on its own, but reading from the beginning of the saga will enhance the enjoyment. show less

Not quite up to the standard of some of the others, but still an above average read. A lot of stuff happened around Bren, but he didn't really do anything until the very last part of the story. Still, I enjoyed the interaction between the dowager and her cousin. And Cajeiri is shaping up nicely. But a lot of Bren's time was spent in transit, like the last book. I'd like him to actually do something.

This final book of the third Foreigner "sequence" #9 in the felicitous threesomes, was tight and action-packed. Of greatest interest, of course, is that Cajeiri, the heir, Tabini's son has been profoundly affected by his two years on "the ship." He is the first atevi child to have been exposed to humans at a very young age and he has an ease with humans that is going to change things down the road, for good or bad, remains to be seen, I suspect, in later books. He has become almost as important character as paidhi Bren, the human interpreter for the atevi.