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A review by tessisreading2
Blood of the Earth by Faith Hunter
3.0
Enjoyable enough but Nell doesn’t quite ring true. On the one hand she’s folksy and self-educated, and then she says things like “Land and property, patriarchy and hierarchy, are all important to them. Women aren’t.” She can’t figure out how to use a hotel access card, but she knows all about fancy private schools in Knoxville. I get that she’s supposed to have educated herself through reading, but she was, until recently, also running a household in the middle of the woods with a husband who didn’t do “women’s work.” I feel like Hunter’s severely overestimating how much free time Nell would have had. She realizes she still wears “church clothes” and is afraid of men and shocked to the point of silence when they indicate they know how to do the dishes, and five minutes later is discussing a man “who, so far as I can tell, has never had the brains to plan anything more complex than how to serve himself up as dinner and sex partner to vampires” - and saying as much to a roomful of menacing strangers who have her handcuffed to a chair. She’s never had pizza or donuts.
The cult is a cult - with multiple wives, twelve-year-olds getting forcibly married off, etc. - but numerous men have been to “university” (not even Christian college) and several of Nell’s brothers eventually tell her they’re headed to MIT (as in, have been admitted and accepted). Nobody ever leaves the church grounds but an entire family of people has passports and apparently it’s just a casual mission trip to Haiti? I don’t understand whether this is supposed to be FLDS-equivalent - obsessively insular and threatened by the outside world - or run-of-the-mill fundamentalist (in which case the level of crazy in cult activities makes no sense). The men in the church can take a vote to kick out leadership but apparently didn’t bother to do so while their own wives and prepubescent children were being by church leadership… and this is presented as somehow “well, it’s all better now and the good people are in charge, so no worries!”
I’m just kind of confused by what PsyLed is doing out in the woods, also. With all their fancy surveillance, both digital and magical, they can’t figure out if there are white vans entering the church grounds around the time kidnapping victims disappear? They’ve got flipping satellite photos. Can’t they check heat signatures in the newly off-limits areas of the church to see if there are people there? The church had dozens of children removed by social services before the book began, and some were later returned. It’s just very difficult to imagine that the US government and this ultra-efficient agency couldn’t come up with some pretense to get on church grounds and investigate suspicious areas without needing Nell’s help.
The book is engaging and the fantasy and paranormal aspects are well-done and interesting. It’s the real-world stuff where Hunter falls down - that and logic.
The cult is a cult - with multiple wives, twelve-year-olds getting forcibly married off, etc. - but numerous men have been to “university” (not even Christian college) and several of Nell’s brothers eventually tell her they’re headed to MIT (as in, have been admitted and accepted). Nobody ever leaves the church grounds but an entire family of people has passports and apparently it’s just a casual mission trip to Haiti? I don’t understand whether this is supposed to be FLDS-equivalent - obsessively insular and threatened by the outside world - or run-of-the-mill fundamentalist (in which case the level of crazy in cult activities makes no sense). The men in the church can take a vote to kick out leadership but apparently didn’t bother to do so while their own wives and prepubescent children were being
Spoiler
forcibly raped and impregnatedI’m just kind of confused by what PsyLed is doing out in the woods, also. With all their fancy surveillance, both digital and magical, they can’t figure out if there are white vans entering the church grounds around the time kidnapping victims disappear? They’ve got flipping satellite photos. Can’t they check heat signatures in the newly off-limits areas of the church to see if there are people there? The church had dozens of children removed by social services before the book began, and some were later returned. It’s just very difficult to imagine that the US government and this ultra-efficient agency couldn’t come up with some pretense to get on church grounds and investigate suspicious areas without needing Nell’s help.
The book is engaging and the fantasy and paranormal aspects are well-done and interesting. It’s the real-world stuff where Hunter falls down - that and logic.