In the Garden of Iden by Kage Baker

[lightreads]

In the Garden of Iden by Kage Baker

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


There’s a lot of stuff going on here I won’t summarize since the book infodumps it way better than I can. Let’s shorthand to girl rescued from dungeons of Inquisition and made immortal time agent of twenty-fourth century corporation, except all the action occurs on an isolated British country estate in 1557.



Lots of little things I like – historical scifi, a dryly hilarious narration, a goat – that somehow didn’t add up into one big thing I like. Dunno. There’s a lot of stuff going on here about mortality and free will. Some of it is familiar from Michael Flynn’s Eifleheim -- you have your dogmatic historical people moving to the tune of their invisible God, and your dryly observant future people moving to the tune of their invisible corporation. Baker gets a clearer shot at it through Mendoza’s weary recollection of herself as a young woman than Flynn did, I think, and it’s all a little sad and grim. But it didn’t really get me.



I do have one reading suggestion. A lot of reviews complain in some confusion about the romance here which is, I should point out, a large chunk of the book. And my suggestion is don’t read it as a romance. Well, okay, don’t read it as romantic. It’s not about being touched, it’s about the older and isolated Mendoza looking back on a time of intense naiveté, and how she was set on the road from the girl she tells us about to the complicated woman telling us the story. It’s not a romance, it’s a threshing machine.





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Comments

[cahn]

Heh. The problem with that is, if you read the sequels... it's clearly meant as romantic.

(I suspect you won't like the sequels particularly. I liked Iden quite a lot, more than you did I think, and I was not particularly taken by the sequels, although they're popcorn enough that they kept me reading until the end. The end book of which enraged me in some ways, but that's another story.)

[lightreads]

meant as romantic.



Oh, I was a wee bit afraid of that.

This is going to irritate me a lot

[readerjane]

For me, this series really comes into its own in The Graveyard Game, the fourth book, where Joseph (the cyborg who recruited Mendoza) goes looking for his own recruiter Budu, a Neanderthal man who had been an enforcer for the Company. There's a mystery, and wheels within wheels (of course), and through it all reflections on what sort of love and what sort of duty Joseph feels toward both his pseudo daughter and his pseudo father.

Unfortunately the series really falls apart toward the end. I slogged my way through the whole thing, and there were still shining moments all the way through. It was a tough slog, though.

[lightreads]

Unfortunately the series really falls apart toward the end.

Wow, literally everyone says that.