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A review by rouver
Buffalo Soldier by Maurice Broaddus
3.0
This felt like a short story that was too long to include in [b:The Voices of Martyrs|29362866|The Voices of Martyrs|Maurice Broaddus|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1461082361s/29362866.jpg|49608242]. Unfortunately, I wanted it to be a lot more fleshed out than it was. The setting was a slice of speculative fiction...what if United States was still controlled by England, Texas was an independent nation, and the native Americans were able to unify and prevent the westward expansion of the Europeans? Although, the world wasn't an exact duplicate...it was "Tejas" and England was "Albion", with a steampunk veneer to the whole thing. With an added dollop of futuristic DNA engineering that gave two characters mystical mental abilities. It took a long while to piece together what the setting was, and who the characters were. I'm familiar with authors throwing the reader headlong into the storyline & revealing everything simply through being immersed in the world, but it didn't work for me in this book. It felt like Broaddus was trying to fit a bunch of intriguing ideas into too short a book.
Broaddus always manages to write bits that I love, though:
"One day, all that will be left of us is our stories. When our tribe has become little more than a faded dream with only our tales left to shape our children and our children's children. But a story only needs a teller for it to be remembered. At night, when the road is free of travelers and the villages are silent, the dream of us will fil the land. There is no death, only movement between worlds.
Our stories live on after us."
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"When the powerless seek their own sense of control, 'crime' is what an unjust system produces"
Broaddus always manages to write bits that I love, though:
"One day, all that will be left of us is our stories. When our tribe has become little more than a faded dream with only our tales left to shape our children and our children's children. But a story only needs a teller for it to be remembered. At night, when the road is free of travelers and the villages are silent, the dream of us will fil the land. There is no death, only movement between worlds.
Our stories live on after us."
---------------------
"When the powerless seek their own sense of control, 'crime' is what an unjust system produces"