@ Tj:

Thanks for posting this. :)

As I said in my email, I thought the focus on piety and religion was a bit of a be a reactionary thing. Majorie and her family were all trying to be extra devout to set themselves aside from the dominant religion of Sanctity. Their faith was a way to set them up as sort of impartial outsiders (without special allegiance to Sanctity nor the Bons on Grass). The outmoded gender roles, rampant misogyny and priests dispensing shitty marital advice with a side of guilt trips, and all kinds of weird hangups about sex seemed all to familiar and very Catholic. So I guess I just took all of it part and parcel as endemic to the setting and sort of built in baggage you are likely to encounter whenever you find a devout Catholic character.

But yeah, the whole thing was rather skewed. Especially how the priests were totally ok with Rigo bringing his mistress along to Grass, but constantly gave Majorie shit for not being a good wife and what not.

None of this of course excuses excuses the rape scenes (both implied and described ones). Now that you mentioned it I remembered another bit that really annoyed me as I was reading it. It was when the policeman’s wife took the first of the mind-wiped girls in and she literally worried that she has to get her out of the house before her husband rapes her. Like this was something normal that happened all the time. Nowhere before was it implied that the guy was anything but an upstanding police officer. Ugh… At least with the Bons you could argue they were hedonistic jerks to begin with, and the Hippae further wrapped their minds (not that this is any excuse for using rape as plot device anyway). But Sgt. Jellico was an ordinary guy from the Commons. I guess this is very telling of Tepper’s general attitude towards rape.

But soon afterwards I sort of put it out of my mind, and got distracted by laser lances and the secrets of the Arbai and somehow managed to completely gloss over it when I sat down to write the review.

I like to think that I’ve gotten pretty good at catching this kind of stuff. I guess privilege is this giant blind spot the size of an imperial star destroyer. If you forget to check it, you will get blindsided. I’m kinda annoyed at myself that someone had to point these things out to me, but I’m really glad you did.

Anyway, thanks so much for posting this. Those are excellent points and I think they work very well as a counterpoint to my overly positive review. Sorry for misleading recommendation. I will try to do better next time. :)

I bought it after reading this review and spent last night reading (then suffering, thorough) it. It started out well (lots of clever ideas and interesting social interactions) but man, the Twilight vibe is strong in this one (oppressingly so, and I’ve only watched the first Twilight movie; even that was for a laugh).
Possible Spoilers below.
The female Protagonist is a pious sex-blocking (for 96% of the book) do-gooder that attracts every single male character including the non-human ones through her virtues. Sigh. And the whole, ‘all young women who are sexually curious/rebellious will be raped to a state of vegetativeness then used indirectly for genocide just doesn’t work for me’. I had to check a bunch of times to make sure the author was actually a woman (she was born in the 20s, which explains a LOT about the position of women in society in this book (probably also explains the strong religious overtones and intense anti-sex overtones-everywhere). Luke had a point about this-because the main characters are Catholics in a sea of ‘other’ they might be ‘extra pious’ in order to set themselves apart..

It did start out good (some of the background ideas are similar to those in an Orson Scott Card book..) but the misogyny and Disney-riffic takes on relationships between the sexes and especially TRIGGER
the point where one of the male characters has a couple of goes at raping his vegetated GF back to normality and gets smashed because he failed and his sister’s standing there pleading to him about sending the vegetable back to it’s family-just…no thanks. =(

On the plus side the writing and flow were pretty good up until the point the shit started to hit the fan and then it was just direct speech and exclamation marks. Lots of potential, but…
I liked Luke’s bad unicorns version better than what’s going on in this book (rape is a cheap and easy thrill/shock tactic in any entertainment. Especially in books that purport to be about strong women. So yea, this book annoyed me).