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This is the third book in Sue Burke's Semiosis trilogy, that follows the events on Earth after some of the rainbow bamboo and other fauna from the planet Pax are brought back.

The previous books worked well for me because they told a story over time from different perspectives. Each segment could stand as its own connected story, and characters didn't have to be fully fleshed out because we were only getting a small slice of them. This book is more compressed in time and so we get a rotation of multiple views from the same characters, bringing back viewpoints from the beginning as a touchpoint at the end. However, there were a number of narrative perspectives that felt like they weren't doing enough narrative or worldbuilding lifting (especially the first couple), and seeing the characters again only made me see how weakly developed they were.

Overall, I enjoyed the evolution of the ideas of this series but the execution could have been better.

The cover blurb makes it sound like a cautionary tale about our highly-tech-dependent world (even in the 1990s!), but it's not the technology that's the problem. It's the homogenization of culture, and the insistence that there be one perspective, and only one perspective, that really matters.

Think of how we travel and find the same chain stores, chain restaurants, the ISO standard Irish Pub with its bric-a-brac decor, and how our TV and movies are full of endless reboots, spinoffs and sequels.

We see it first in Sutty's memories of Earth, controlled largely by a theocracy until contact with alien civilizations kicks their support out from under them. And then in the world she's trying to understand, one that's undergone a complete transformation in the time it took her to travel there at relativistic speed. She knows there were flourishing cultures here before she left Earth. She studied the few fragments that made it offworld during first contact. But she finds a world that has discarded its past and modeled itself on the one she left.

It's largely a story of discovery: Sutty, frustrated and depressed, trying to figure out what the heck "The Telling" actually is and what it means, and the government agent shadowing her also discovering what it is he's trying to suppress and why. A lot of it takes place in small villages, but there's also a long trip through mountains that feels like counterpoint to the glacier expedition in The Left Hand of Darkness.

Well worth the read!

(Slightly condensed from my website.)

This was a shameless gossip read for me, I'll admit it. My mom was obsessed with the Duggars and their show and would always have it on in the background. Something about it always gave me a bit of the ick so I never watched it with her, but I remember enough about what was going on in some of the episodes so I figured I would give this a read because I like to support people that break the cult cycles of their families.

Hearing the way that she was raised by her parents to always be under her dad's thumb resounded heavily with me due to being raised in a religious family that wanted me to be a good little submissive housewife for someone in the future, and they weren't even involved in anything more than a standard religion. I am really glad that she references that the only reason they have been able to solidly move forward and get to where they are is due to working heavily with a therapist.

I know she said this wasn't meant to be a dirty tell-all, and there is noticeably quite a bit of information left out, but she still needs to protect her peace and she is still hoping to try to be able to have a relationship with her family at some point (on her own terms, obviously), so I can understand why she would not want to get into the deep conversations more and just kind of brush over them.

If you didn't know the show growing up, I don't really know how much this would interest anyone. But for those that are interested in learning more about different cults, she puts a good amount of information on that in the pages. So I can't say I would really recommend it, but if either of those would interest you, I think it'd be a decent read.