The Fresco [Import] [Hardcover]

Sheri S. Tepper (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Gollancz (2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0575071915
• ISBN-13: 978-0575071919
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (61 customer reviews)

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.