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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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