The Best of All Possible Worlds

Karen Lord's "The Best of All Possible Worlds" starts off interesting enough. It opens with a male being named Dllenahkh who is away from his home planet on a retreat when it receives grave news that his home is no more.

And so the story begins of Grace, a human, and Dllenakhk, a Sadiri, who come together to help the remaining Sadiri find suitable mates so that they can survive now that they are effectively homeless.

On the one hand, I liked Lord's world building. It is unobtrusive and matter-of-fact. That said, it was also very wordy. As was the dialogue. Yet, I can't fault Lord because her characters are very intelligent beings so they will speak almost formally at every juncture.

I really did like Grace who is wry and empathetic. Dllenahkh was also likable in a Spock-familiar way.

Yet, in spite of the things that I did like, it was just a bit too slow moving for me and I struggled to finish it which is why I can't quite give it a 4-stars. If it had been just a little faster paced, I think I could have put it at a 4-star.

It was pretty much impossible for me not to identify the alternate
group of humanoids known as "Sadiri" in this book with Vulcans.
They're emotionally controlled, have lots of mental powers and have
developed an advanced form of meditation in ascetic centers. They do a mental
form of space travel (shades of Dune), and have great political power
in a consortium of several humanoid life forms spread over a number of
planets. A terrible tragedy brings Sadiri refugees to Cygni Beta,
where they work with that planet's bureaucracy to seek out communities
with strong Sadiri genetic and cultural material. This gives us a
chance to learn lots about the many subcultures of Cygni Beta.

Less focus on the central romance, which seemed pretty obvious most
of the way through the book, and more other plot elements would have
been an improvement. I'm also a bit frustrated by novels about
emotional women and apparently emotionally unavailable men.

But I found it well-written, with excellent descriptions, with a good
number of well-drawn characters, and I'm glad I read it.

Science fiction is a tricky genre for me. I respect it, but I've never really connected with it as a reader. Plus, I look for at least a bit of romance in everything I read, and the sci-fi books I've read rarely have enough to satisfy me. So when I do chance upon a sci-fi book that hits the right notes for me, needless to say, it's a big deal.

The Best of All Possible Worlds was an interesting reading experience for me. The premise itself is pretty straightforward. A once-powerful, scientifically-minded alien race suddenly finds itself homeless, and a group of male survivors seeks refuge in the colony of Cygnus Beta. As a government scientist and language expert, Cygnus Beta native Grace is assigned as a liaison to the Sadiri to help them set up homesteads (settlements) and further integrate into Cygnus Beta society. Her Sadiri counterpart in this endeavor is Dllenahkh, and together, with a small team of other Sadiri and Cygnus Beta representatives, they set off on an expedition across the colony.

There was a lot of stopping here and going there, and the result is a patchwork collection of scenes sewn together. For the most part, that style worked, but I have to admit, I sometimes felt like I was reading filler, and I'd find myself impatiently waiting for The Next Big Thing to happen. It's also impossible to avoid comparisons between the Sadiri and the Vulcans from Star Trek. Personally, I didn't mind that, although I suspect some readers might.

The real meat and bones of this book is the relationship between Grace and Dllenahkh. Theirs is a thoughtful, mature relationship based on mutual respect, liking, and shared interests. Despite having very different personalities and backgrounds, Grace and Dllenahkh work extremely well together. Their interactions are so right and natural, and it's obvious they hold one another in high regard. Did I hope for a romance between them? You betcha! The potential is certainly there, but the hints are subtle. Almost too subtle. And yet, somehow, I was fine with it. As much as I wanted big declarations of love, or better yet, some hot and sexually charged moments, I didn't need it. That's practically unheard of for me.

Though slow at times and loosely structured, The Best of All Possible Worlds turned out to be a fascinating sci-fi novel and one I'd recommend to anyone who likes character driven stories with light romantic elements.

3 Stars ★★★
ARC provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

In the episode "The Naked Time" of the first Start Trek Nurse Christine Chapel openly admitted her love for Spock, despite the Vulcan's confession of his inability to return her feelings. What does that have to do with this book? The main character Grace Delarua is in love with the Sadiri Dllenahkh
and seems unwilling to admit it to herself or him. They spend a year finding suitable breeding stock for the, now, small population of male
Sadiri on Cygnus Beta after their home planet is destroyed by their enemies / relatives. The team of 4 Sadiri and 4 natives of Cygnus visit
the ends of the planet in search of mostly NaSadiri and find some very surprising populations and unique adventures.
I enjoyed the book although as a romance it isn't what I was expecting in a sci fi novel.

Take an Ursula LeGuin-esque socioanthropological narrative on a future human-colonized world and add a dash of romance between a Spock-like hero burdened with the sorrow of his entire planet destroyed and an impulsive, open-hearted "human" who is sent with him on a planet-wide mission and you'll have an interesting tale of culture clash, politics, and philosophy of assimilation vs. preservation.

But okay it's also a bit weird. I was almost put off by the very opening where the hero, Dllenahkh, learns of the destruction of his planet, but if you hold on to the next bit where the heroine, Delarua, begins her narration, you'll be rewarded migthily. The story of the planet-wide mission to find posssible remains of the Sadiri culture from settlers who arrived hundreds of years ago before the destruction of Dllenahkh's planet is told in a vignette-style. At each new settlement they encounter new problems and new philosophical questions.

The Sadiri are a race that have telepathic/psionic abilities that are only controlled by meditation and strict mind disciplines. Delarua's planet is a mishmash of human/Sadiri ( a bit more complicated than that but too long a description to fit here) peoples. In one village, they find outwardly Sadiri people who are intent on using violence against other tribes encroaching on their territory; another settlement is the home of originally Sadiri settlers who took Old Terran Celtic elven myth to shape their culture; at another settlement Delarua is instrumental in stopping an opera tenor from actually killing his costar, etc.

Each vignette deepens the bonds between all the mission folk as well as Delarua and Dllenahkh. The Sadiri reservation and emotional control means we get delicious, almost Darcy/Lizzie type scenes where the understated emotions and feelings are channelled into formal speech and actions.

At the end of the book, I just wanted more :)

This Book's Snack Rating: Garlic Parmesan Kettle Chips for the luscious, creamy taste of Pride &Prejudice romance on the sturdy crunch of imaginative science fiction philosophy and world

This novel is simultaneously deeply subversive and disappointingly conventional.

It obviously owes its premise and much of the feel of its world to Star Trek. It's set in a universe where the speed of light is no barrier, where there are quite a few practically-human species capable of star flight, whose planets interact the way countries here on Earth do (meaning there's immigration to and from, they form alliances and declare war, and there's trade) and all of them can interbreed. The Sadiri, the victims of the genocide, are definitely Vulcan-like; though they have not rejected emotion in favor of logic, they have epitomized restraint and morality to the rest of the galaxy, and they attribute their superiority in those fields to the way they have developed their telepathy through meditation and mental exercises.

Interestingly, though not particularly relevant to the story, this is a galaxy without Earth and humans-as-such; Earth is apparently under an interdiction, and the rest of the humanoid species have no contact with it other than the occasional snapping-up of doomed groups to be brought into the galactic fold for their useful genetic diversity.

The first sign that this is much more than just Star Trek-influenced cross-cultural-contact SF is the information, right off the bat at the start of chapter two, that Cygnians and Sadiri (who make up nearly the entirety of the cast of characters) possess "eyes, hair, and skin all somewhere on the spectrum of brown." There is one character, late in the book, that I would identify as white; he's so minor that I've forgotten his name, and what role he played.

The second sign is the nature of Cygnus Beta, the planet almost all of the action takes place on, and the home world of the protagonist. It is a planet of refugees, one of which the protagonist says "There isn't a group on Cygnus Beta who can't trace their family back to some world-shattering event. Landless, kinless, unwanted. . ." It is a poor planet, and one that the rest of the galaxy views as superstitious and backward. But it is not the violent, gang-ridden techno-poverty of the sort that is so often fetishized in cyberpunk, and it's not the picturesquely feudal and martial poverty of, for example, Lois McMaster Bujold's Barrayar; it's just the poverty of being a people whom circumstance and hostile action have rendered relatively resourceless.

The third sign is the breezy, confiding tone of Grace's narration. Lord's first novel, Redemption in Indigo, took that same tone; there, it was the obvious choice, a folktale fantasy narrated as it would be around a fire on a winter's night. But that tone, when transposed to a distinctly science fictional setting, becomes in itself somewhat revolutionary. Much of science fiction, particularly science fiction with pretensions at seriousness, adopts an objective tone, a distant faux-historical viewpoint that is meant to give it gravitas. That tone often hides as much as it highlights, encouraging the reader to look away from all the things that are missing (brown people, poor people, oppressed people). Grace's voice, warm and occasionally exasperated and always distinctly personal, makes this book feel real, aliens and telepaths notwithstanding.

That level of personal-ness is ultimately what I found so exciting about this novel. It is 100% science fiction, and the sort of science fiction I always find more satisfying, where the world is messy -- multiple types of telepaths, lots of different cultures and subcultures, the sense that the characters in the novel all have existences extending far into the past and the future, rather than existing purely for the sake of the plot. But it is also incredibly domestic -- ultimately, what the Sadiri need is to find a whole bunch of brides, because in the aftermath of the almost-genocide they were left with an incredibly male-skewed gender balance, and so the plot of the novel is taken up with a quest through Cygnus Beta looking for communities that have higher percentages of Sadiri bloodlines, so that the remaining Sadiri males can look for mates.

And that is where the novel becomes unfortunately conventional. Lord makes a point of how progressive Cygnus Beta is: there is a character of whom Grace says "Lian has chosen to live without reference to gender. This may or may not mean that Lian is asexual, though many of those who are registered as gender-neutral are indeed so. However, it doesn’t matter, because this has no bearing on our mission and is thus none of our business”; various comments indicate that bi/pansexuality is the norm; Grace jokes with her mother that the woman her mother is trying to seduce away from her husband actually wants Grace's mother to join in a triadic polyamorous relationship with the both of them. But there is absolutely none of that diversity of sexual and gender identity represented in the Sadiri and their plight: the Sadiri survivors are (almost) all men, and they are all going to be forced to enter into heterosexual monogamous relationships that are expected to be reproductively fruitful. And no one blinks an eye at that. It is a strange bit of cognitive dissonance, that Grace is so fully enmeshed in a non-heteronormative, non-monogamous society and yet is falling in love with a man from a society so much more rigid without even once questioning how willing his people are to abridge their right to self-determination.

(It is particularly galling, given that this is a science fictional setting, that Lord never addresses any potential technological fixes to the problem of a small, male-dominated survival group: no mention of genetic engineering, cloning, uterine replicators, anything beyond "get boy and girl to have sex, make babies".)

Still, aside from that conventional core, this novel is a delight. Grace's narration makes it a fast, enjoyable read. The quest plot takes the reader through quite a few very distinct subcultures on Cygnus Beta, the same way Isaac Asimov's Prelude to Foundation explores the various sectors of Trantor. There are several call-backs to Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, the Sadiri coming to Cygnus Beta intending to reshape it for their needs but ending up becoming rather more Cygnian than Sadiri in the process. There was also a significant reference to Jane Eyre, which seemed out of place. But most of all, I spent the novel thinking that Lord was doing much the same thing science fictionally as Lois McMaster Bujold was doing fantastically in her Sharing Knife quadrilogy -- they set up rigorous SFF worlds, and then they put those worlds at stake, positioned their cultures on the brink of extinction due to both external and internal forces; then they resolved the stories by having their characters settle down and make babies. This is, of course, an entirely fair resolution; if your culture is in danger of extinction, pretty much the only solution is to have children to carry it on. But it's a solution that sits oddly in the SFF canon.

A note on the cover: When I first saw this cover, my thoughts were pretty much "Hey! The person on the cover is non-white! Yay! But what's with the elephant?" I got to the end of the book and kind of wanted to *headdesk*. The elephant, surprisingly, was entirely relevant, was one of two symbols used heavily throughout (the other was a hummingbird, which made its way onto the British edition cover). But the woman on the cover, who I assume is Grace, has very definitely been white-washed.

Karen Lord’s anthropological sci-fi certainly seems to be very highly rated by reviewers, and for my part, I’m not completely sure why. The book isn’t a bad one by any strength of the imagination. It contains a lot of thought-provoking material, a few interesting characters, and has some interesting exploration of various cultures spread across an alien world. But it was also fairly slow-going, I felt distant from nearly all of the characters, and it largely seemed to lack a point or an end goal.

Open-ended cultural explorations can be a lot of fun, and the amateur anthropologist in me enjoyed the chance to look into the lives and cultures of so many different races of non-human, seeing how they interacted and what made them tick and how they thought and understood the world. Lord definitely shows some good imagination and an eye for detail where this was concerned. But the vast majority of the book can be summed up by jokingly saying, “Sorry, Mario, but your princess is in another castle.” Only replace Mario’s name with Dllenahkh, and the princess is compatible genetic material to keep the Sadiri race alive after their planet was destroyed. Very interesting premise, but the book was told in episodic leaps and bounds, jumping from one culture and place to another as the party seeks breeding partners for the last few Sadiri remaining, so that their lineage remains as pure as possible under the circumstances.

It felt similar, in many ways, to filler episodes in TV shows. But when over half the book felt like a succession of filler episodes, it seemed less like a cohesive story and more like a literary exploration of culture, a similar-themed collection of short stories where very little actually happens.

I can attribute the distant narrative tone to the role of the narrator herself. Grace, as an observer to the mission, recorded events with detachment, not getting too close to what her job had trained her to not get too close to. Accurate, and conveyed well, but it’s the sort of thing that worked better in hindsight than when actually sitting and reading the book. That style of narration and observation made it very difficult for me to connect to any of the characters, and while intellectually I could comprehend their urgency and distress, there was no empathy.

Provided you go into this book with certain expectations, The Best of All Possible Worlds might well be something that works for you. It fell short of my expectations, however, and while I can’t deny Lord’s talent with writing and her evident creativity, I ended up not really enjoying this book as much as I wanted, and found myself continually disappointed with it. Interesting as a literary experiment, not so great as a singular cohesive story.

I was a science fiction reader back in the heyday of writers like Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimove, Arthur C. Clarke, Poul Anderson, among others. It seems to me that the sense of wonder and fun has largely disappeared from the genre, but Karen Lord gives me hope that at least some of what's missing in this literature may be coming back. I do wish she'd cut the romance element a bit, but she's a woman and I can graciously allow her to jazz it up for others of her gender. So my criticism of a bit too much on the lovey dovey stuff is a kind and forgiving one. All in all, this is a book i recommend to those who miss the old time science fiction.

In a distant future, humans have spread across the universe. Somewhere along the way, several different human races emerged including the Sadiri. The Sadiri are a disciplined race with sophisticated emotional control and reliance on rational thought and behavior (think of the Vulcans from Star Trek). The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord opens when the planet Sadira is destroyed by an unprovoked genocidal attack. The only Sadiri to survive are those individuals who were off-world at the time. More women were living on their home world during the destruction, so there is significant gender disparity among the survivors. Of those remaining, some are working to create a new home world, New Sadira, while others find refuge on the plant Cygnus-Beta. There, the Sadiri attempt to regroup after the massive loss. These survivors are also hoping to secure appropriate mates from the taSadiri race living on Cygnus-Beta. The taSadiri happen to be the most genetically compatible to the Sadiri because they are actually Sadiri descendents making them the most ideal candidates.

The story is told almost exclusively through the first-person account of civil servant, Grace Delarua, who is tasked with helping one of the Sadiri leaders, Dllenahkh, transition to the Sadiris' new home on her planet. She eventually takes part in an assignment to help Dllenahkh and a few others (some officials from her world as well as Sadiri officials) seek possible genetic taSadiri matches. Yet, they are searching for more than just perfect genetic counterparts. Their primary interest lies with taSadiri societies that have maintained some of the Sadiri belief systems, rituals, and histories so that the Sadiri way of life will not be lost as they repopulate their numbers.

While this novel is categorized as a science fiction, it is basically a romance story set in a futuristic world. Don't get me wrong, it does have some sci-fi elements like time travel, telepathy, mindships, and alternate universes but except for telepathy, these concepts aren't described in any great detail. Still, I enjoyed the slow blooming love affair between Dllenahkh and Delarua. Their affection is clearly based on the mutual respect and caring that is fostered by the combined sharing of each other's cultures.

Slow-moving at times, the novel does pick up once the love story takes shape. At the heart of this work is how two dissimilar groups establish relationships and gain understanding and acceptance as their races merge into one society. It is the familiar tale of how people come to realize that they have more in common with their neighbors than they originally believed.

However, this work has some issues. The entire planet of Sadira suffered this horrendous genocide and what's left of its people are strewn across two worlds, New Sadira and Cygnus-Beta. Obviously, the author's intent wasn't to showcase the dark aftermath of genocide but considering half the characters in the book lost their home world, family, and friends less than a year prior, it felt as though it should have been more significant. At times, even Delarua almost forgets the pain the Sadiri must be suffering...but she is an outsider to this void and emptiness they must be feeling. Dllenahkh is the obvious choice to address these ideas, however, while Dllenahkh has a minor POV throughout, it is not large enough to gain the deeper insight needed. The author does deviate from the romance angle at times to deal with political and ethical issues but the transitions into these scenes are usually less than smooth and don't feel central to the story. Still, I choose to concentrate on the story Lord was telling and reserve my judgment on that score.

The Best of All Possible Worlds is a solid read and enjoyable but it isn't a novel I'd want read over and over again. Still I recommend it specifically to those individuals who enjoy their science fiction a tad more literary as in the style of Ursula K. Le Guin or those who enjoy romance set in fantastical worlds.

Ultimately this is a book about optimism. Characters struggle and suffer, bad things happen, but the possibility for growth and happiness exists.

The plot is fairly simple. Following a genocidal attack, Sadiri refugees on the planet Cygnus Beta are struggling to continue their existence as a distinct culture. Their fundamental problem: most of the women were killed in the attack, leaving the refugees with an extreme imbalance of male survivors. In order to find an appropriate pool of potential brides, a joint delegation from the Sadiri community and the Cygnus Beta government travel around the world, visiting various locales in order to gather genetic samples.

Lord's story centers on two characters: Grace Delarua and the Sadiri councilor Dllenahkh. She's warm and empathetic. He's cool and cerebral. You can guess how it goes. (But that's OK. Sometimes judicious usage of a trope plays off well, and this is one of those cases.) Delarua is the primary POV. Her personality shines through and builds the tone of the book. Delarua's empathy ensures that we are invested in the characters and through them in the small personal story that Lord tells.

Lord makes an interesting choice in TBoAPW. Events that would be the core of most SF books are somewhat marginalized, and occur in the background. The destruction of the Sadiri home planet, kidnappings, the investigation of slavery, the prosecution of a telepath who has been manipulating others; we see the events only in the aftermath as they play out in the lives of our small group traveling around Cygnus Beta.

And so back to optimism. We see the aftereffects of these various disasters and problems, but the focus in on overcoming them. Rather than dwell on the negative, Lord gives us a story of survival and ultimately triumph. We are given a tour of a world that has its share of problems, but are left feeling that these problems are solvable, and that ultimately it is possible to not just endure, but to create better lives.

The Best of All Possible Worlds is an outstanding novel, and quite frankly so accomplished that it is difficult to believe that it is only Lord's second novel. It's rare to read such a humanized story of interstellar colonization, and rarer still to read one so polished. It's sure to be one of my favorite reads of 2013.

It is refreshing to find a science fiction theme that is fresh and not derivative of existing work, but this book is precisely that. An intriguing concept that combines an intimate personal reltionship,albeit a very unusual one between nearly alien characters, with sweeping themes of interstellar disaster and the very humun need to survive as a race at all costs, it's certainly not shy of tackling large questions. The only diasappointing element is the author's occasional impatience with her own story; significant plot developments can be glossed over in bald narrative or even reported as breifly sketched reminiscence, rather than fully written. The book was enjoyable, but it would have been the better had it been half again as long to give important elements the detailed treatment they warrant. Still, an imaginative story line and well drafted characters make this a gripping and fun read. I'm looking forward to reading more by this author and hoping she finds the patience to give her unique stories and vivid characters the patient, fully fleshed treatment they deserve.

I quite enjoyed it, even though the premise was ultimately a straight cross-species romance that developed with the racing speed of glaciers moving across landmasses. Overall, a good read, and not your usual story.

As I read this novel, I kept hearing the (boring) lectures of my high school English teacher about the "picaresque" novel genre. In Karen Lord's book, our heroine and hero go from one outre setting to another, observing and commenting, but not really engaging with any fully-formed indigenous personalities. "Pilgrim's Progress"...dry stuff, indeed. As others have noted, the romance was predictable, bereft of engaging conflict or drama, and consummation was, almost literally, so underplayed as to be non-existent.

Another Ursula LeGuin? I. Don't. Think. So. I can imagine a number of highly interesting places LeGuin could take this narrative - emphasis on "interesting". Karen Lord, I'm sorry to say, is no LeGuin, at least not yet. I'll check back in with Lord in a decade or so, but in the meantime, I glad I checked this out from the library.

Two alien races work together to save one and maybe both from extinction.

This is an easily readable Sci-Fi novel that falls somewhat flat.
Character development was superficial and for the most part predictable.

If you are looking for an exciting book this is not it. But I if you just w as by something mildly Sci-Fi here's your chance.

Genuinely different, this book follows neither the classic structure of sci-fi adventure nor the predictable plot of a romance novel. Instead the author uses elements of these to examine questions of culture, evolution, immigration, interdependence, religion, and surviving personal and genocidal disaster. The book is entertaining-- captured and held my interest to the very end.

Its sometimes difficult for me to get into sci fi books but I found every inch of this amazing! Loved Delarua and her view of the world and Karen Lord's style. This was awesome and everyone should read it.

A challenge to your understanding of what it means to be human. Imagine us scattered to the stars for hundreds of years and then cataloging all the changes and developments each colony has earned. It's wonderful. Very sweet and tender at the same time. I feel in love with the characters and their lives.

The story moves very quickly. Excellent plot line with plenty of twists to keep you engaged. You may see (or think you see some outcomes at an early stAge but you'll be surprised how you get there. Highly recommended

Have you ever had such glowing things to say about a book that you struggled to find the right words? Yeah. That. That's where I am with Karen Lord's [insert word of glowing praise here] novel. So, rather than try to find the right adjectives, let me note what I most loved about this novel. There may be some spoilers in what follows, so proceed with caution.

* Lord obviously respects her readers' intelligence. She doesn't take the time to infodump or explain everything. This is a true first-person narrative in the sense that the narrator knows things and her imagined audience knows those things too, so why would she explain them? Lord expects her readers to put the pieces together into a coherent whole and I love that.

* I love that this is a very human story set against a remarkable backdrop. The focus is on two people and the story of how they slowly fall in love. Lord explores a unique universe full of sci-fi awesomeness, but that is all just background for the relationship forming between these two characters we come to love, admire, and root for. Brilliantly done.

* The Best of All Possible Worlds. Wow. When the mindships' capabilities are explored for the first time, the title takes on a whole new significance. I don't know if Lord was exploring in story the philosophy and theology behind Luis de Molina's attempts to reconcile God's sovereignty with human free will, but that is where my mind went. The title and the tragedy makes me suspect this was Lord's intention and when I made the connection, I had to set the book down and think.

* And yet, the novel was so very readable! We're introduced to lots of new terminology and yet Lord helps us to understand as she invites us to inhabit this imagined world.

* It was funny, fascinating, fun, and so very enjoyable.

When award season rolls around, if I could I would hand over all of the 2013 awards to Lord. This novel deserves them.

The story focuses on the Sadiri search for possible female mates as a way of the continued survival of the purity of their race.

Maybe I'm shallow and not cerebral enough, but I do prefer to be told a good tale rather than get mired in sterile world building and sociological observations while trailing a rather predictable and prosaic romantic arc.

I plodded through the story, skipping large tracts without missing much, and ended exactly where I expected I would.

Happy Reading!

I absolutely adored this book. Oh my god. The story was wonderful, the romance solid, beautiful, and realistic, (not rushed or tawdry) and the world building just perfect. I think Karen Lorde is just the best. I don't think black female Barbadian authors are well represented in scifi, so you GO girl, I am a freaking fan!

This book is well written and very imaginative, but I found the story to be just OK. While I did enjoy the main character, Grace Delarua, I found most of the other characters to be aloof and only mildly engaging. Central to this story is the tragedy of the Sadiri, whose home world is annihilated, but this event is presented in such a sterile and dispassionate way that I didn't feel the tragedy. This made the story strangely detached and emotionally starved. So, in the end, the story stands or falls with the romance between Grace and Dllenahkh and this romance is a little too cerebral and talky to carry the day.

"The Best of All Possible Worlds" by Karen Lord is, I guess, science fiction because it takes place on not-Earth and features aliens. Actually everyone is a human, but they are different species because they split off from each other long ago and each has evolved slightly different characteristics. Also their cultures are different.

That's the main point of this book, the differences in the cultures of the different hum - I mean alien races. One species' home planet was destroyed along with most of their population. They've decided to settle on another planet that has settlements from all the other species of human. They tour the diverse settlements to determine if any of the other species would be suitable and willing to help them breed and rebuild their society. They are escorted by some scientists, one of whom is the narrator.

I found this to be a fairly uninteresting, yet oddly readable book whose saving grace is that it's well written; the only aspect of the writing that gave me pause were the modern colloquialisms the narrator uses in conversation that seemed out of place for a far future sci-fi world.

And about that. Nothing really science fictiony happens - oh, sure there's some stuff about telepathy but it's a minor plot point. And this book is also a love story of sorts, but nothing decidedly romantic happens. It almost seems like this began as a love story that was too thin on its own so science fiction aspects were added to flesh it out but, quite frankly, this book may have been better suited to have been set on now-Earth and been about the real, diverse cultures here...then maybe all that telepathic stuff would make more sense.

I sincerely doubt that I am the primary or secondary (probably not even tertiary) demographic for whom this book was written, but all the same, I read this book and these are my opinions.

Very pleasant read when you just want to relax and read a book. Warm fuzzy, almost Victorian, love story fairly free of patriarchal ickies along side an episodic adventure that examines what happens to cultural identity after the death of a species' homeworld.

I've been reading science fiction since high school. I'm always looking for new authors. I am frequently disappointed by what I find. That said, I was pleasantly surprised by this book.

The book engaged my interest immediately. The book retained my interest until the end. I read the book cover to cover in one sitting. My only complaint about the book is that it is too short. I hope this author continues to produce at this level. I am eagerly awaiting the next book.

I've been reading science fiction since high school. I'm always looking for new authors. I am frequently disappointed by what I find. That said, I was pleasantly surprised by this book.

The book engaged my interest immediately. The book retained my interest until the end. I read the book cover to cover in one sitting. My only complaint about the book is that it is too short. I hope this author continues to produce at this level. I am eagerly awaiting the next book.

This is not your everyday ho-hum book about inter-racial events, but a thoughtful and intriguing portrayal of integration with an alien yet not inhuman race and what may happen. Well done and very enjoyable.

After reading positive and so-so reviews, I expected a slightly entertaining read. I found a book that I would like to read again - which is rare for me. This book strongly reminded me of my favorite movie The Winslow Boy. It was all in the looks! I love subtle love stories.