God's War by Kameron Hurley

[lightreads]

God's War by Kameron Hurley

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Bounty hunter and occasional gene pirate takes a job that puts her squarely in the middle of the centuries-long internecine religious war.

Interesting as hell, but also frustrating and unsatisfying. It would be too obvious to call this gritty, so I'll go the extra mile and explain that I kept asking questions of the world building like okay, seriously, you've been massacring your populations for a hundred years at the front, and yet both societies are still built around sending bodies out to fight? Bodies from where? And then Hurley told me where the new population growth comes from in a nearly casual aside, and I went . . . oh, swallowed hard, and moved on. This is a bloody, awful world, vividly drawn, and pretty close to fascinating.

Unfortunately, the character work was done with a much heavier hand, and I found myself impatient with a lot of it. Also with the gender politics – this is one of those worlds where women are far more likely to survive than men, so you have most of the problems of the patriarchy but in reverse, plus a few extra. That aspect, like much of the work regarding the religious conflict itself, felt like pieces of machinery put carefully together and then not connected up to anything else. I don't know, I wanted more out of it than I got.

Basically, it's a debut, and it interested and annoyed me in shifting proportions. I felt much more cheerful about it when I realized that I don't really want to read the next two books in this trilogy. But I really do want to read Hurley's sixth or seventh book, somewhere around there, because she's got something here and I really want to know what it's going to grow up to be.




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