Customer Reviews

Mission Child

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

 

 

Maureen McHugh has already proved herself to be the single best builder of lived-in sf worlds working in the field today. Her talent for capturing ordinary people is stronger than ever in Mission Child, but those ordinary people are living very adventurous lives. McHugh has added a lot of beauty to her always spare and graceful prose. This coming-of-age story features war, guns, reindeer, alien hi-tech, pirates, Laplander cyberpunk, and a cross-dressing shaman who is one of the most memorable characters in SF this decade. My favorite SF book of the last five years.

A colonized world develops a unique identity and culture. Years later, one of its citizens develops a unique identity as well, adapting to her culture by taking on the identity of a man. Soon, she finds that her gender-blurring actually appeals to her in ways beyond what her situation demands of her.

I love Mission Child as much as McHugh's more popular novel China Mountain Zhang, which received the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Locus Award for Best First Novel.

McHugh is a great writer who can involve readers in any scene, regardless of how much or how little action that scene contains. The language seems descriptive to an extreme, but she still manages to tie those descriptions into the thoughts and feelings of the characters.

Before reading her work, I read reviews that included complaints about her supposedly not focusing on plot. Readers can find countless formulaic, plot-driven science fiction and fantasy novels, but they won't find many original and evocative writers of McHugh's caliber.

McHugh's other novels include Nekropolis and Half the Day Is Night.

This episodic speculative novel is a consistently surprising story about a young woman named Janna, her struggles to find a place in her world, and her identity in that world. A character driven story, it will remind you of LeGuin & Dickens, as Janna winds her way through an interesting myriad of personalities. I really liked the way this author handled the material with such unflinching sincerity and confidence, that she never felt she had to justify or overexplain the world, the social system, the character motivations, or the gender issues that arose. A prophetic book? Possibly. But definately for the thoughtful reader.

I was facinated by this book, I could not put it down. It was gentle, it was shocking, it was deliberate. It made me uneasy, it made me think, it made me want to scream and cry. But most of all, it made me lonesome. This is the most lonesome story I ever read.

I have always wanted to go into space. Just to visit a space station would be sufficient, but the idea of exploring new worlds and new civilizations is my wildest dream for my children. Now I read a book that points out the lonesomeness of being in space -- a long way from home, forgot and forgotten, lost in more ways than I can imagine. Jan/Janna has even lost her personal identity. That she lived and had any sense of social responsibility at all was interesting.

I loved the ending. How else could the book end but with words of hope and promise? The last 3 pages were worth the wait. Lyrical, beautiful, sad, and lonesome. This book says there is a lot more to space exploration and space explorers than action and adventure.

I recommend this book for everyone who enjoys the earlier "China Montain Zhang". For those who have not read McHugh before, start with CMZ. Whatever your choice, I very much love McHugh's description of characters and their dealing with life as we know it. Their living sometimes may appear to be aimless, but never pointless...

Maureen McHugh is known for the grace and subtlety of her prose. She does not disappoint in this latest journey into the developing heart of a young girl, coming of age amid the chaos of a changing world.

_Mission Child_ explores the world of a pre-industrial child as she begins to cope with the destruction of her secure tribal culture and her exploration of the alien industrial environment in which she must learn to survive.

I gained a new understanding for what it must be like to suddenly find oneself an utter stranger to one's land and even oneself. Jan/Janna is no great hero. She makes terrible mistakes, has good luck and bad, is blown by the winds of her own emotions as much as by the winds of change that sweep her world. But it is the triumph of her sense of self that keeps us rooting for her.

There are no easy answers in this book--no cookie-cutter endings. It was a wonderful story. I enjoyed it very much.

I come away from this book with a firm conviction that Maureen F. McHugh is an excellent writer. Her novels aren't overbrimming with heartstopping action, but she weaves delicate stories with intricate character and world development. I opened this novel expecting a slow-moving, dense story, instead, sentence by sentence kept me reading late into the night; I absolutely had to know what happened to Janna.

Janna is a teenager on a snowy colony world, growing up on an "appropriate technology mission," where offworld technology is carefully restricted as not to threaten the natural economic development of the world. Yet as all good intentions, the half-hearted involvement of the offworlders only brings the worst of modern griefs to the natives - weapons, war, displacement, plague, without any of the modern benefits. Janna is caught in the middle of all that, from bandit raids, to war, to starvation during a long flight through the snow, to refugee camps. Through it all, her identity slowly matures, from a young naive girl into.. not quite a woman.

The ending felt rather abrupt, although not quite as jarring as in "Nekropolis," and not unsatisfying. The novel just ends, rather than wraps up, but the decisions Janna makes in the end show how far she's come. I recommend this book to those who are willing to give up some thrills & excitement in return for fine prose and simply a quality literary work. Personally, I liked it a lot and wish I'd read it sooner.

Maureen McHugh has outdone her previous two novels (Half the Day is Night, China Mountain Zhang) by a quantum leap with Mission Child.

Mission Child tells the futuristic odyssey of Janna, a young woman who undergoes many changes in her search for a role in life. From her begining as a child of the Hamra Mission, a low-tech culture on a world long-ago colonized by Earth, Janna sets forth on a journey across the planet when her clan is murdered by invaders. It is the first time Janna must come to grips with death, but certainly not the last.

As Janna travels from city to city, we see the colonization of the planet through her eyes. She encounters several different cultures, all vaguely familiar to the reader, yet altered by their adaptation to their new world. McHugh does an incredible job of presenting these cultures through Janna's eyes in a believeable way. McHugh's grasp of the narrative is amazing.

I rank this book up there with SF classics like Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. Definitely a must-read book.

Brought back deep memories of my experiences as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Africa, 25 years ago.

This book doesn't come close to how interesting China Mountain Zhang or Half the Day is Night are.

The book is well written, however the story goes nowhere and the ending is totally curt and unsatisfying. I kept waiting for something to exciting to happen, nothing ever did.

Don't waste your time on this book - I'm sorry I did. Read CMZ(5*) or HTDIN(4*) instead. Those books were MUCH more interesting and engaging.