https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3157724.html

I bought this on seeing a recommendation from someone back in 2011; and I cannot not find whose recommendation it was, or why. I thought at first it might have been Liz Bourke, but her review is from 2012, after I had bought it. Lisa DuMond wrote it up in 2000, the year after it was published, but I don't think I saw that either.

It's a book about the intersection of religious doctrine and security politics, in a society where a Reformation is up-ending traditional power structures. Unfortunately I never quite understood what was going on, and was particularly thrown at the very beginning when the central character's brother, a serving member of the security forces, fears he may be in trouble because he accidentally killed a member of a minority group during a riot. This doesn't seem very plausible. I note that Bourke and DuMond, who are otherwise boosters of Matthews' work, are frank about the imperfect execution of this one. I haven't read anything else by her, and I'm not going to look out for it based on this. ( )

There is a common idea that the joy is in the journey, not the destination, but this book gives more a sense while you are reading that when you get where it's going, it will all prove to have been worth it - and then the destination proves not to have been so fine after all.

The author is a fine writer. The writing is clear and descriptive. There is an internal conflict in the protagonist to be resolved. I didn't find the heroine's experiences on the road to resolution to be very interesting, though; and the book's ending is ambivalent. Does it resolve the internal conflict? Is there a sense of rest? Not really. Did the protagonist change? Yes. In a way that we can clearly see is for the better? No. The author wants us to see that she has changed for the better, but there is nothing that convinces us there is a real improvement. The heroine is always just a regular, decent person from the start, and her change isn't one that is bound to bring betterment to her life or to others'. It might, or it might not. We the readers see no outcome.

'Avalanche Soldier' was written well enough to keep me wanting to see what happened, and some books don't do even that for me. At its conclusion, though, I wondered why I had bothered to read it. I'm not aware of a sequel, though a sequel just might redeem it. Short of that, I wouldn't recommend this book. The author has written other, finer books more worth your time. ( )