Beggars Ride [Paperback]

Nancy Kress (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Tor (1996)
• ASIN: B000OTS94G
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, August 7, 1999

By 

Kenneth R. Bridges "Siddhas" (Thousand Oaks, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beggars Ride (Beggars Trilogy) (Paperback)

"Beggars Ride" is both the shortest and the least satisfying book in Ms. Kress' "Beggars" series. From the standpoint of construction, the book has a number of contrived plot devices. I can't go into those without giving away parts of the story. Suffice it to say, they will be obvious to most readers. The author introduces one appealing new character who overcomes her psychological and emotional difficulties through force of will. In her earlier books, Ms. Kress explored the impact of both real and perceived psychological differences on groups of people. The message from this book seems to be that you can will away shortcomings and change your neural function at the same time. Had the first book of the series been of the quality of "Beggars Ride", I certainly would not have gone further. This was a disappointing end to an otherwise powerful exploration of social inclusion, exclusion, and discrimination.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Perfunctory writing suits unengaging characters, February 11, 2002

By 

i_am_tooch (Sunnyvale, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beggars Ride (Beggars Trilogy) (Paperback)

It's a credit to Nancy Kress's skill that she got me to read to the end of the book, though I think it might have been more a case of wanting to see the entire train wreck.

The Beggars World series started off with a simple premise that quickly got out of hand: people who don't need to sleep are...well, omnipotent supermen. Eh? Having written herself into a box, Kress keeps the Sleepless offstage for nearly the entire book, then dispenses with the problem entirely through a pair of perfunctory, Sterling-esque plot twists. It kills me that I can't reveal them. Suffice to say that they're logically implausible given the nature of the people they affect, as painstakingly delineated over the preceding hundreds of pages.

Fine. But who are the Emergency Backup Protagonists? We've met them before: whiney milquetoast-with-a-woody Jackson, his daffy sister, quasi-Hellbitch Vicki, and Certified Hellbitch Cazie. Oh, don't forget sooper-genius hacker Lizzie, who reverts to Liver speech, her, when under stress, notices, and then just keeps doing it, her. Gaak.

Well then. Maybe the overarching theme redeems the book. Why yes, it does: Feeling sad? Feeling blue? Turn that frown upside down and just whistle a happy tune! I can't imagine this book actually suggests that one can overcome crippling anxiety and depression by make-believe and goodthink, so I must have misunderstood this part.

Did I mention the whole series is set in one of the most numbingly unpleasant dystopias ever to grace the SF field? If you're going to go that route, you'd better give us characters that make us care, that engage our sympathy or outrage. But all the groups we meet--Livers, donkeys, Sleepless--are so thoroughgoingly repellent that you kind of wish the bad guys *would* win and exterminate the species already, so we can start over with monkeys or penguins or something.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Horrible let-down, August 10, 2000

By 

Hugo Calendar (San Jose, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beggars Ride (Beggars Trilogy, Book 3) (Hardcover)

This was a terrible finale to an otherwise pretty good trilogy. Social interaction and even the science was unrealistic beyond what should be expected from mediocre science fiction, and the book basically undid everything that happened in the previous two books. Don't finish this trilogy. Go read something else.