Take a photo of a barcode or cover
macloo 's review for:
Cards of Grief
by Jane Yolen
This was short and fun to read. Anthropologists from Earth visit a small civilization on an Earth-like planet where the people are ruled by a Queen from an ethnic group called Royals; six other ethnic groups make up a very striated society in which everyone but the Royals is a peasant, basically. Grieving is their art form, and death is often handled as a choice — although maybe not the choice of the person who is to die. Among the anthropologists we have a young man and his mentor, a much older woman known as Dr. Z. Among the Grievers, we have a temporarily virile young princeling and the Queen's Own Griever, who is a young woman with a hauntingly beautiful voice. And the Queen, whose word is always the Truth.
I didn't feel the whole grieving thing came off as well as the reproductive habits of the Royals in their somewhat desperate quest to perpetuate themselves, and the relationship of the Queen to her princes was interesting too. The ritual phrases and the ideas about truth and memory appealed to me too. The world isn't as richly detailed as worlds by some other authors (in addition to anything by Ursula K. Le Guin, Embassytown by China Miéville comes to mind), but it's consistent, and it sucked me in. The cards don't appear until the end, and they seemed a pretty weak element to me.
I didn't feel the whole grieving thing came off as well as the reproductive habits of the Royals in their somewhat desperate quest to perpetuate themselves, and the relationship of the Queen to her princes was interesting too. The ritual phrases and the ideas about truth and memory appealed to me too. The world isn't as richly detailed as worlds by some other authors (in addition to anything by Ursula K. Le Guin, Embassytown by China Miéville comes to mind), but it's consistent, and it sucked me in. The cards don't appear until the end, and they seemed a pretty weak element to me.