Mission Child (Mass Market Paperback)

by Maureen F. McHugh (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Mission Child is an expansion of Maureen McHugh's "The Cost to Be Wise," a fascinating novella from the original anthology Starlight 1.

Janna's world was colonized long ago by Earth and then left on its own for centuries. When "offworlders" return, their superior technology upsets the balance of a developing civilization. Mission Child follows the journeys of Janna after she and her young partner escape marauders who attack their hometown. The girl, fast becoming mature beyond her years, sets off across the planet on an odyssey of adventure, poverty, hard work, war, famine, and rebirth. Janna uses her meager skills to eke out a living in a changing world; she gains and loses a husband, a child, friends, jobs, and more.

McHugh weaves together anthropology, sociology, psychology, and gender relations in this wondrous journey. Janna assumes the guise of a boy for protection, but eventually becomes "Jan" to herself as well as others. Reminiscent of Ursula K. Le Guin's insightful works set in the Hainish universe, Mission Child will doubtless be nominated for a Tiptree Award for its exploration of Janna's gender identity. --Bonnie Bouman --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
Issues of gender and humanity infuse this beautifully written saga of a woman's journey of self-recovery. On a distant world, in the far northern reaches, the Hamra clan village is an "appropriate technology" settlement, where the descendants of a long-ago Earth colony live peacefully?until the village is attacked by the marauding Teske clan. The only survivors, teenager Janna and her boyfriend, Aslak, flee across the icy plains, wandering from village to village. Janna becomes pregnant and gives birth to a daughter, who soon dies, as does Aslak. Alone, "Jan of no clan" makes her way to a refugee camp, where, emaciated, she is taken for a boy, a guise she adopts at first for protection, and later because it feels right. Afraid of being found out, Jan moves on to the city of Taufzin, where her ability to speak English attracts a job working for offworlders. Busy, grim, impersonal Taufzin is the opposite of peaceful Hamra; isolated and lonely, Jan falls in love with a criminal, to whom she reveals the secret of her gender. A tragedy ultimately sends Jan to yet another part of the planet, the hot Southern islands; there, though still a foreigner in every way, Jan finds her place in the world. Fans of Ursula Le Guin will find much to admire in McHugh's (China Mountain Zhang; Half the Day Is Night) intelligent, carefully wrought novel of a world that is familiar yet very alien.
Copyright 1998 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: 370 pages
• Publisher: Eos (HarperCollins); First Thus edition (November 9, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0380791226
• ISBN-13: 978-0380791224
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #779,442 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars McHugh's best: adventure, tragedy, wit, beauty, January 26, 1999

By	Sean Stewart ([e-mail]) (Monterey, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mission Child (Hardcover)

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.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Skip It., February 25, 2000

By	T. Eichman (Berkeley, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not for lovers of plot, May 12, 2000

By	Bradford Daniels (Redmond, WA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

In Mission Child, Ms. McHugh does an excellent job of creating a new and interesting view of the future of life on a distant planet. Her protagonist, Jaana, is convincingly written as a woman born in a primitive society trying to manage contact with advanced technology from earth and the people who bring it.

The problem is that the entire book is little more than a description of life on a planet without a lot of native technology. The story, such as it is, is told in the first person from the perspective of Janna, a woman who is not really prone to introspection and has a tendancy to flee anyplace that might give her more insight into her own nature.

Near the end of the book, Jaana starts to make a kind of connection to the wold around her, but she never really does. The book ends with the same kind of "when's the sequel coming?" ending as China Mountain Zhang, but unlike that oustanding book, I can't see any evidence that a sequel would have much more of interest to say.

Reading this book reminded me in some ways of reading the first book in the Thomas Covenant series. The main character was an idiot at the start, and made it through the whole book without quite ceasing to be an idiot. Unlike Lord Foul's Bane, however, Mission Child doesn't have a lot of cool secondary characters that make it worth reading.

In short, the plot is relevant only as an opportunity for character development, but the main character steadfastly refuses to change. As a result, the book is weak both on plot and on character development. The reason it gets two stars from me is that McHugh has created an excellent backdrop for a character who has some interesting attributes. I only wish there had been some coherent plot to the whole thing, or some real development of the main character.