The Fresco [Mass Market Paperback]

Sheri S. Tepper (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 5, 2002

The bizarre events that have been occuring across the United States -- unexplained "oddities" tracked by Air Defense, mysterious disappearances, shocking deaths -- seem to have no bearing on Benita Alvarez-Shipton's life. That is, until the soft-spoken thirty-six-year-old bookstore manager is approached by a pair of aliens asking her to transmit their message of peace to the powers in Washington. An abused Albuquerque wife with low self-esteem, Benita has been chosen to act as the sole liaison between the human race and the Pistach, who have offered their human hosts a spectacular opportunity for knowledge and enrichment.

But ultimately Benita will be called upon to do much more than deliver messages -- and may, in fact, be responsible for saving the Earth. Because the Pistach are not the only space-faring species currently making their presence known on her unsuspecting planet. And the others are not so benevolent.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Part thriller, part social SF, prolific novelist Sheri S. Tepper's latest follows the adventures of Benita Alvarez-Shipton, an empty nester in her mid-30s, whose life is changed when two aliens ask her to carry their greetings to Washington, D.C. Chosen as intermediary because she is both ordinary and beyond political reproach, Benita seizes the opportunity to leave her abusive, alcoholic husband and start a new life in D.C. However, she doesn't count on her role extending beyond the initial delivery of the alien greetings, or on the dangers it will attract to her and her children.

Chiddy and Vess, ethical representatives of the benevolent Pistach, come to offer earth inclusion in a multirace Confederation--but on condition that earth clean up its societal woes. Earth has also attracted the attention of a subgroup of predatory races, who view the overpopulated planet as a rich hunting ground. Humanity must choose--either adopt the Pistach principal of Neighborliness and be ushered into the Confederation or refuse and be left at the mercy of the predators.

Interwoven with the earth-based action are excerpts from Chiddy's diary, written as a letter to Benita, that describe the complex Pistach society and the Pistach religion documented by the eponymous Fresco. The 17-panel, divinely inspired painting has for centuries been obscured by smoke from votive candles. Tradition dictates the events and symbols that lie hidden beneath the grime, and it is taboo to ever clean the Fresco. When Chiddy accidentally clears away part of the soot, revealing images that contradict Pistach dogma, it sets into motion a chain of events that undermine racial self-perception and threaten both Pistach and human survival.

Though some of the characters are drawn with such broad strokes as to render them caricatures, and there are elements of Pistach social engineering to alarm readers of just about any political stripe, The Fresco is nonetheless an engrossing, sometimes wickedly funny read. --Eddy Avery --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

HSo what do women really, really want? Elementary, Dr. Freud, according to Tepper's enchantingly sly feminist tale of Earthlings' first contact with alien starfarers: nothing that "virile, arbitrary, egocentric, and often belligerent" human males can supply. Abused wife to a feckless alcoholic, orphaned child of a wise Latina lady and her salvage-yard husband, Benita Alvarez-Shipton finds herself at 36 chosen by Chiddy and Vess, ambassadors from the galactic Pistach-Home, to introduce their message of peace to a largely skeptical, male-dominated U.S. government. Tepper intersperses episodes of Benita's struggle to help Chiddy and Vess with entries from the journal Chiddy keeps for her, an explanation of the Pistach moral-ethical religion centered upon a sacred fresco. To punctuate the many wrongs men in charge have committed, Tepper also inserts some headlines excruciatingly close to today's political scene: "Baptists claim ETs possible demonic invasion; Falwell says ETs more likely gay." Among other fitting punishments, the Pistach envoys see to it that rigid male right-to-life senators are impregnated by sentient wasps, whose larvae chew themselves out of righteous, unanesthetized senatorial bellies. As a clever roman clef and the stuff of secret female dreams, this novel succeeds brilliantly. Better yet, as a commentary on the capacity of women to endure, to achieve and to overcome, it shines as brightly as the stars that one day may provide what Tepper's women really wantDtrue peace. Tepper's novel will sell to wide range of SF readers, but special targeting to women, for instance in feminist bookstores, will increase sales. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Harper Voyager (February 5, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 038081658X
• ISBN-13: 978-0380816583
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (61 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,457,711 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An enjoyable new read for the Tepper faithful, November 25, 2000

By 

"mrgeorgandis" (Bellaire, TX USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Fresco (Hardcover)

The Fresco will probably not take a place among my favorite Tepper novels. (I like Grass, Shadow's End, and Gibbon's Decline and Fall best.) Nevertheless, I did very little but read the book the Friday after Thanksgiving - it held my attention well, I wanted to find out what would happen to the characters, and I was at least mildly intrigued by several of the novel's driving ideas.

The book "suffers" (if you're inclined to call it suffering - I think that I am not) the usual infusion of very blatant social and political philosophy. This is a strange thing for me to get used to (even after reading more than half a dozen Tepper novels); I tend to agree (often passionately) with the essential social and political ideas Tepper works with, but I often find myself uncomfortable with her very direct use of these ideas in fiction. Something about very explicit politics seems to limit the power of great fiction. (And I'm not discriminating here - much as I love John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Charles Dickens's Hard Times, the authors' forthright use of politics always diminishes the feeling I take away from these books.)

Anyway, the usual ideas are present in The Fresco: a rather common woman becomes rather uncommon as she discoverers a greater sense of worth, or purpose, and so on. I really like this character, and I must say she is one of the reasons I did not take many breaks while reading the novel - she is not a terribly complex creation, but she is attractive, likable, and a generally useful protagonist.

Hm - I should have planned this review before I started writing! I'll close with a general recommendation: if you enjoyed Gibbon's Decline and Fall, please read The Fresco. The two novels have much common ground, and they go well together. If you have not yet read Sheri S. Tepper, I would start with Grass or Shadow's End, both of which exist in a slightly less political "realm."

I've never been able to pin down exactly what it is I like so much about Tepper's books, but I haven't missed one in many, many years. I'll look forward to the next!

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Has she been chopping a lot of wood?, March 3, 2002

By 

Kim Boykin (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Fresco (Mass Market Paperback)

Tepper sure has a large collection of axes to grind. This could've been a much better book if she'd left the axes in the shed.

I liked the protagonist, Benita Alvarez-Shipton, a self-educated mom from New Mexico who has an abusive, alcoholic husband. I liked the main aliens and their culture and their mission to Earth. And I liked the touches of humor, like when the aliens cause an "ugly plague" among women in Afghanistan so that the men won't have an excuse to keep them covered and cloistered.

I expect a feminist agenda from Tepper, usually handled with a fair degree of subtlety and creativity, but in this book, we get heavy-handed polemics on practically every political and social issue in the U.S.--the environment, education, the "drug war," the legal system, the ACLU, abortion, conservative religion, you name it. Yeesh!

And yet, I liked the characters enough and was curious enough to find out what happened that I read the whole book and mostly enjoyed it. But Tepper has written many books that are better than this one, with "Grass" and "The Gate to Women's Country" at the top of my list.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Making Up for Lost Time?, March 31, 2006

By 

M. Murphy "mzmorpheus" (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Fresco (Mass Market Paperback)

As a liberal feminist I've never really been able to stomach dated SciFi authors like Heinlein. So I was happy when I discovered Tepper's "Gate to Women's Country" about a dozen years ago. Aside from her stoggy descriptions of less-than-interesting sub plots (a Greek play) and her brush off of some big social debates (homosexuality), Tepper does alright for an old gal who's a former Planned Parenthood administrator.

But I never really bought into "The Fresco", mostly because so much of the writing read like an outline and/or like it was never really edited by Eos Publishing. In "The Fresco", Tepper has an answer for everything from drug abuse to rape in the form of polite, beetle-like aliens who come to our planet to fix us and appoint a middle-aged Hispanic housewife as their go-between with the People of Earth.

While "The Fresco" outlines some witty, sardonic SciFi answers to today's problems, it failed to really draw me into the various scenarios. Tepper never even really bothered to physically describe some of the villan aliens and eeks by with sketchy physical descriptions that would leave Steven Spielberg scratching his head.

If you're craving SciFi from a woman's perspective, I'd suggest N. Lee Wood ("Master of None", "Faraday's Orphans") who's tough characters, quick dialogue and a deft description paint a more serious picture of a future matriarchy.