Bone Dance by Emma Bull

[lightreads]

Bone Dance by Emma Bull

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Weirdly forgettable post apocalyptic story of body-hopping genetically engineered super soldiers and a battle with the old gods. A coming-into-self story narrated by an intersex person (or possibly a sex-neutral person, this was not clear to me). I'm trying to remember if I've ever seen it on any of those LGBT scifi interest booklists that float around, because I feel like I haven't and that maybe everyone else forgets this book, too. I've never been as impressed with Emma Bull as a lot of people I know, but I feel like this one wasn't me. This one was a hodge-podge book that was trying to do something interesting with the narrator's lack of gender, but executed it in such a way that I seriously thought our first two narrative clues about what was going on were copyeditorial mistakes. Some warm emotional stuff here about forging connections out of isolation and recovering from violence, but I was distracted by the 'throw it at the wall, see if it sticks' A-plot, and by the way my mind seemed to magically slide off this book even as I read it.

I should stop wandering randomly around Bull's catalog and just read War for the Oaks already, shouldn't I?




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Comments

[kate_nepveu]

I like _Finder_ better than _War_, but I also liked this book better than you, so take it for what it's worth (though I haven't dared re-read it for fear that the hoodoo stuff would not have aged well for me).

ObYuletideRec: http://yuletidetreasure.org/archive/70/ahost.html