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pinenoodle 's review for:
Escaping Exodus
by Nicky Drayden
DNF at about 33%.
I almost never DNF books, but this was attrocious. The short version is this felt like the author was a fan of something like 70s or 80s era scifi, but wanted to add diversity to that kind of story. All well and good, if not something that will win any points from me. However the world building and the main characters (at least the more-or-less princess) are attrocious.
The main character feels like she has no sense and is just trying to get into trouble. I was guessing this was YA (it's hard to get a read on the age of the characters, but one main character comes of age, and the other is being thrown into work as a young woman in what seems to be the kind of early industrial job that ate up children/young adults before labor laws came into effect) in which case that kind of thing is common if still annoying, but as best I can tell now it is just normal adult fiction. Part of the problem is that one of her mothers, the more or less queen, has decided not to bother raising her because she wasn't ready.
Which sounds like the height of stupidty, but it's also somewhat how this society works. As mentioned paranthetically above, among the lower classes they throw younger people at work and watch many of them die. It's worse then that--they don't seem to train them, they do not warn them of the dangers that they face. They actually like it that way because, apparently, they want to weed out the less capable ones who can't survive on a deadly job on instinct. Which you can imagine from industrial magnates readily enough who value profit over anything and have a cheap labor force ready to replace the dead, but the people throwing these youths into the fire are their relatives.
On a related and most absurd note is the population control applied to this society (because apparently getting most kids killed doesn't limit the population enough) is that adults form family groups of 10 people, and each of those can only have 1 child between them. The stated reason is that they live on living ships so they can't have too many people. But doing that will reduce the population by 90% each generation--if everyone lives which we already know they don't. That might be an extreme measure for extreme over population but it's serious overkill to do generation after generation after generation if you just don't want too big a society.
I almost never DNF books, but this was attrocious. The short version is this felt like the author was a fan of something like 70s or 80s era scifi, but wanted to add diversity to that kind of story. All well and good, if not something that will win any points from me. However the world building and the main characters (at least the more-or-less princess) are attrocious.
The main character feels like she has no sense and is just trying to get into trouble. I was guessing this was YA (it's hard to get a read on the age of the characters, but one main character comes of age, and the other is being thrown into work as a young woman in what seems to be the kind of early industrial job that ate up children/young adults before labor laws came into effect) in which case that kind of thing is common if still annoying, but as best I can tell now it is just normal adult fiction. Part of the problem is that one of her mothers, the more or less queen, has decided not to bother raising her because she wasn't ready.
Which sounds like the height of stupidty, but it's also somewhat how this society works. As mentioned paranthetically above, among the lower classes they throw younger people at work and watch many of them die. It's worse then that--they don't seem to train them, they do not warn them of the dangers that they face. They actually like it that way because, apparently, they want to weed out the less capable ones who can't survive on a deadly job on instinct. Which you can imagine from industrial magnates readily enough who value profit over anything and have a cheap labor force ready to replace the dead, but the people throwing these youths into the fire are their relatives.
On a related and most absurd note is the population control applied to this society (because apparently getting most kids killed doesn't limit the population enough) is that adults form family groups of 10 people, and each of those can only have 1 child between them. The stated reason is that they live on living ships so they can't have too many people. But doing that will reduce the population by 90% each generation--if everyone lives which we already know they don't. That might be an extreme measure for extreme over population but it's serious overkill to do generation after generation after generation if you just don't want too big a society.