Reviews

The January Dancer by Michael Flynn

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mferrante83's review

4.0

Everything in the universe is older than it seems. Blame Einstein for that. We see what a thing was when the light left it, and that was long ago. Nothing in the night sky is contemporary, not to us, not to one another. Ancient stars exploded into ruin before their sparkle ever caught our eyes; those glimpsed in glowing “nurseries” were crones before we witnessed their birth. Everything we marvel at is already gone.

So begins The January Dancer a modern space opera full of the action, politics, and mystery told with poetic language and deft touch. The book opens up with the appearance of a mysterious bard seeking the story of the titular January Dancer (which goes by a number of other names throughout the story) a mysterious stone that twists its shape. Thereafter the novel unfolds on two levels: the story, told by the scarred man at the harper’s behest, and the interaction between the bard and the scarred man. Both are interesting in their own right with the italicized sections detailing the conversation between the bard and the scarred man providing a kind of running commentary not only the story itself, but on the nature of stories in general.

I picked up The January Dancer hoping for a good space opera novel. I got one -- though it's space opera primarily insomuch as it handwaves much of the complexities of FTL and spawns several stellar (if human) civilizations) -- but what the book reminded me most strongly of was Isaac Asimov's work. Like some of Asimov's best books (The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun) this book is a mystery powered by a set of science fictional rules.

At first glance (and second and third) the Dancer -- an alien artifact recovered from a long-derelict museum -- seems like nothing more than a MacGuffin, but as the story unfolds it becomes clear there's something else going on here. The book doesn't end with a bang; there's no Death Stars exploding, no mighty clash of galactic fleets -- but it's satisfying all the same.

jlynnelseauthor's review

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3.0

I thought that this was an interesting look at space travel that is not based on what we've seen pvsly in Star Trek. The book did not unravel a lot of its mysteries, though, and the ending was VERY anticlimactic. It left it open for a sequel. The story is being told to a bard who wants to make a song out of it, and in the beginning it is pitched as an increasing tragic tale. At the end, I did not get this sense at all and felt like I missed something. There are lots of characters, and sometimes its easy to get lost in who is being mentioned and when. Started out as a good read, but I was VERY disappointed in the ending. Did not wrap things up OR explain what happened during the "cleansing."

edgeworth's review

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2.0

I wanted to like this much more than I actually did. Eifelheim was one of the best books I read in years, and this is a planet-hopping space opera revolving around the crew of a tramp freighter chancing upon an ancient, possibly alien artifact on a remote planet, and then the ensuing interstellar power struggle as various factions attempt to find it and seize it. Flynn is an excellent writer, but in this case he lets his imagination lead him too far down the garden path, as the enormous cast of characters and overly-complicated plot and worldbuilding left me quite astray; in the second half of the book I'd given up trying to figure out what was going on.