Customer Reviews

The Awakeners: Northshore & Southshore

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I couldn't put this book down. It's so well-conceived, the characters are accessible and interesting, the story was multi-facetted and solemn. I'm not sure Amazon.Com will know to recommend this to you, but if you love in-depth stories with characters you come to know, in political and social situations that are captivating and real-seeming, you should not only read "The Awakeners" but you should also consider Richard Adams lesser-known book "Maia" for a similarly involving, detailed story. I highly recommend both books!

As usual Tepper brings to life a complex and extremely realistic world. Her heroic characters are multi-dimensional and evolve during the course of the story. The plot twists and turns as the host of main characters (there have to be at least ten) each add to the story from their own point of view. Somehow Tepper manages to keep all the action coherent and moving in a forward direction but the reader has to really pay attention! This is not a book that you can put down and pick up two weeks later unless you have a phenomenal memory. The only weak element is in the creation of the villians. They are almost one-dimensional and are reminiscent of the flat villians of Tepper's Six Moon Dance. Villians aside though, this is a typically wonderful Tepper book. You'll feel sad when its over.

Awakeners is one of Sheri Tepper's better stories. In her best works, she shows a concern for environmental issues and human feelings, without becoming tedious or preachy. In Awakeners, one of her older novels, she weaves together the stories of several individuals living along one river that both unifies and divides their world.

This is a very imaginative story. On a distant world, mankind - now without any of the technology which first brought their human ancestors there - must wrestle for power, and even survival, with a predatory native species. The writing is inspired, the various plotlines intertwine marvelously, and the world-building is superb.

Mainly, the characters are interesting: the boatman whose realistic sculpture of his dream woman is replaced by an actual drowned and blighted woman, and then replaced again by the woman's living daughter; the queen's daughter who is sent to seek an empty continent her people might flee to; the slow-moving baby who is part alien (or something).

But other characters are mere stereotypes, of the exact type this author seems to employ all the time: the narrow-minded and very unintelligent prude; the equally unintelligent military general who fights for baseless causes; the sadistic misogynist; the powerful old geezers who gladly sacrifice the lives of others in exchange for a worthless immortality; the irresponsible creatures who disrespect their females and then outbreed thier food supply. And so on.

Too bad. Here is a talented author whose writing is full of surprise and irony, but who falls prey herself to the most unsurprising irony of all - that of having a sharp eye for the biases of others while being blind to one's own.

I am reluctantly giving this four stars.

I enjoyed the book (Sheri Tepper is one of my favorite writers). This book (combo of two volumes) definitly has a plentitude (?) of twists, plotting, romance, and details. Once started I didn't want to put it down....HOWEVER, while you learn a LOT about the Thraish, the Talkers, and the Trecci...it is rather annoying that more detail and attention was not given in developing the Strangeys, their contribution to life on the planet, and the conclusion of the Lila substory. In some ways it feels like the needed explanations were cut out in the editing and unfortunately, the result left me feeling that there is a fairly large hole in the narrat sligtly wanting. Ultimately it was hard for me to give an rating - I think 3 and a half stars really more accurately reflects my feelings.

Sheri S. Tepper is one of my favorite authors for making me think outside the box. Tepper's characters are so detailed, the story so absorbing, the ending, so unpredictable. For her excellent writing, she is one of my favorite authors. With every novel she writes I never know what to expect, but I know it will be something excellent and something that makes me think deeply about human life. The Awakeners (North Shore and South Shore) is a two book series that depicts a society that is awakening in order to examine what is happening to a very structured fantasy society that has accepted everything it was told to accept. When the societal structure begins to break down it is very interesting to watch the characters in their different positions deal with it. If you like sci fi, futurism, or fantasy you will enjoy each book she writes. Actually, this looks like they put both books together in one and if the publishers did that it would be so much better. Each of her books are fantastic to read. They are each so amazingly and creatively detailed that it boggles the mind how she comes up with such rich and exciting senarios. I love the way I never know the ending of Tepper's novels. Her books are excellently written, very fun to read, have a message, and Tepper's books have a way of changing the way you look at the world. I love it!!!

This is definitely not one of Tepper's major works, and that's too bad, because it starts with lots of potential. Unfortunately, it appears that she grows bored with her original premise, and the story soon degenerates into Tepper's stereotypical blend of Male-Bashing and hyper-conservative politics. The first book is solid, if cliched scifi/fantasy fusion, with Tepper's usual setup of a human colony on an alien planet. She throws out a bunch of promising concepts, such as the planet's lack of metal, which are unfortunately never used after their first introduction. By Book Two, most of the mythology introduced in Book One has become irrelevant, and the plot takes increasingly nonsensical turns, until Tepper finally arrives at the same horse she's beaten for three decades now: Men are evil, sex is bad, (unless it's woman on woman sex, or woman on alien bestiality, or woman on emasculated man sex) and everyone, yes EVERYONE in the Universe except for the Tepper-surrogate Female Protagonist is a corrupt idiot.

If you're looking for superior works by Tepper, I suggest the Marianne novels, "After Long Silence", or, of course, her True Game novels. If you're looking for hard-core Feminist, anti-male politicizing, but done in an infinitely better way, read her "Gate To Women's Country." Or, if you really want to read The Awakeners, stop after the first book, because nothing that happens in the second adds anything at all to the original story.

Started out great, as usual with Ms Tepper. However, on reaching page 161, up popped a short story or something entitled, "All Flesh is Clay," followed on page 168 by "Twenty-two and Absolutely Free" and on page 190 by "Hooked On Buzzer" which ended on page 192 with the reappearance of The Awakeners' page 193.

What I read was fine but the missing 30 pages ruined it. Obviously the publisher, Orb, ripped you off as well as me

I've been a great fan of Sheri S. Tepper's for years, but somehow I missed this book, perhaps because it was published before I started her books. I'm glad I finally found it! Ms. Tepper is one of the few authors whose work seems to be detiorating with time; the quality of her books have been going downhill since "Gibbon's Decline and Fall". But this is vintage Tepper: a great plot, compelling and interesting characters and even a message about the nature of humans. Don't miss this one!

Ms. Tepper has a fabulous command of the language and weaves engaging scenarios and presents us with fascinating characters, but the story line stutters a bit too often. The ending was too abrupt and Lila disappeared with barely a whisper. The strangeys remained too strange (who were they, where did they come from and why?) I never fully grasped why the Awakeners dosed the dead with Tears to wake them up--- later in the book it was implied that this was for the Thraish which seemed odd since the Talkers wanted 'live' twitching food (yikes!) and the fliers were content with the dead... so what was the deal with the zombie-like folks.
At any rate, I did like the book very much- and perhaps wanting to have more loose ends resolved and story lines completed shouldn't make me give The Awakeners just three stars, but that's all it gets from me.