Oh, the many ways I hated this one. First there's the creepy rapey, near necrophiliac prologue. I would have pulled out there, but this book was a gift from a friend who counts it as a favorite. Next strike was the voice of the narrator. The premise of this book is that its heroine is a updated, near contemporary Frankenstein monster. She's been put together out of three dead women, and has the scars to prove it. It might have been easier to believe in Keelie if we had more distance from her--but her first person voice? Well, first I just can't believe this is a real woman who has been through anything like this, and then I believe she's an absolute idiot:

I went to him. His fingers touched mine. I wanted to drop into his arms. Yes, this was the reason for my existence. Him. It had to be.

I smiled. Pierced together to be a love machine for this gorgeous hunk of a man.

Later she has sex with this guy with a hairy back who asks her not to turn on the lights. And when Victor (his real name, and she thinks of him as "Frankie") is puzzled the next day by her references to them having made love, she's still clueless someone else took advantage of her. After this, a woman named Lillith--an obvious jealous rival--tricks her, but Keelie still believes what she has to say. Riiiiiight. I couldn't believe they had really attached a working brain to her body. Oh, and just about every male in the book is a sexual predator or abuser.

But then the fatal thing? The clanging New Age feminist Pagan twaddle where we're told how once upon a time women ruled the Earth and there was World Peace! The last straw was on page 79 where I was told nine million were killed during the "Burning Times" "because the women remembered a time when god wasn't in heaven and women and nature were sacred." First, we're talking about most probably 40,000 and at most 100,000 people who were executed as witches over about a 500 year period. And not all of them were women--a good number, maybe a quarter of them, were men. There's no evidence it had anything to do with Paganism either. Or that paganism has ever been linked with egalitarianism or matriarchy. Or that ancient times were ever more peaceful than our own other than they didn't have the population or technology to pull off genocide with our panache. But goodness they tried. Look up Pagan Roman history sometime.

So, as far as I'm concerned, what we have here is a badly written ill-conceived book filled with neopagan propaganda. There were interesting questions raised about what was really going on with Keelie, but by page 100 I couldn't stand the thought of lasting to page 340 to find out. Hell, I just couldn't stand her.

As I said, a friend of mine does adore this book. She says there are few books out there that hit the spot for her when it comes to her own Pagan beliefs. That there are fantasies out there that might reflect some, that have elements of the paranormal or Goddess worship, but that isn't the same thing. I hold unorthodox views myself in politics, and there was a time especially early on when a kind of "libertarian pornography" appealed to me just for the pleasure of seeing my own beliefs reflected in a fictional world, although these days I don't like books that are too preachy even when they do reflect my own beliefs. And if they are preachy, then they better have strong enough virtues in the writing to make up for it. So I do get the appeal of this sort of book for some. But this book most definitely doesn't do it for me. ( )

Tiptree longlist 1996 ( )