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A review by chantaal
Primary Inversion by Catherine Asaro
2.75
My thoughts are all over the place, I don't really have a proper review for this.
I think the character work her was in turns very strong, and very weak. Strong because when Asaro is having Soz deal with her PTSD in therapy, it breaks down a lot of who she is and why she is, and that helps her make plot decisions that make sense (to a degree). I didn't much like the romance additions in each part of the book because it only ever felt like Soz liked one person - the others just felt like instalove, or instafriendstolovers - but when she was working on herself and dealing with her trauma, Soz was great. Weak characterization came with how Soz was pretty much great at everything ever AND she's sexy AND she's basically a princess AND she's extremely gifted at empathy/cyberspace work/etc etc etc. She felt like she started as an incredible Mary Sue who eventually got filled in with some real character work.
No other characters felt great. I just didn't care about anyone else, to be completely honest. Maybe Soz's father, in the end. They all just felt like they were supporting actors playing whatever role the story needed for Soz.
The plot was fine, but holy hell was it bogged down by the most intense, infodumpy narration I have EVER seen. I don't know if this was a characteristic of 90s sci-fi, but there were pages and pages of just explaining every little interesting thing that the author made up, with no real purpose. Like yeah, tell me all about inversion works...only for the actual mechanics of it to matter in one page at the end. The infodumping absolutely breaks up the flow of the story as a whole. The political plot fared better, at least; I understood decisions characters were making or decisions Soz made to prevent or solve problems. The ending was quite lovely, even if I didn't believe in the romance/character work there.
Really, this was interesting and I'm very glad I tried it out despite having big issues with it. The narrative in the middle of the book that focused exclusively on Soz attempting to face her trauma was fantastic stuff.
I think the character work her was in turns very strong, and very weak. Strong because when Asaro is having Soz deal with her PTSD in therapy, it breaks down a lot of who she is and why she is, and that helps her make plot decisions that make sense (to a degree). I didn't much like the romance additions in each part of the book because it only ever felt like Soz liked one person - the others just felt like instalove, or instafriendstolovers - but when she was working on herself and dealing with her trauma, Soz was great. Weak characterization came with how Soz was pretty much great at everything ever AND she's sexy AND she's basically a princess AND she's extremely gifted at empathy/cyberspace work/etc etc etc. She felt like she started as an incredible Mary Sue who eventually got filled in with some real character work.
No other characters felt great. I just didn't care about anyone else, to be completely honest. Maybe Soz's father, in the end. They all just felt like they were supporting actors playing whatever role the story needed for Soz.
The plot was fine, but holy hell was it bogged down by the most intense, infodumpy narration I have EVER seen. I don't know if this was a characteristic of 90s sci-fi, but there were pages and pages of just explaining every little interesting thing that the author made up, with no real purpose. Like yeah, tell me all about inversion works...only for the actual mechanics of it to matter in one page at the end. The infodumping absolutely breaks up the flow of the story as a whole. The political plot fared better, at least; I understood decisions characters were making or decisions Soz made to prevent or solve problems. The ending was quite lovely, even if I didn't believe in the romance/character work there.
Really, this was interesting and I'm very glad I tried it out despite having big issues with it. The narrative in the middle of the book that focused exclusively on Soz attempting to face her trauma was fantastic stuff.