Audiobook
$0.99
with membership

Hardcover
$6.48

Paperback
$15.00

Buy used:

$6.48

$11.91 delivery February 5 - 27. Details

Used: Very Good | Details

Sold by ThriftBooks-Seattle

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

In stock

Add to List

Added to

Unable to add item to List. Please try again.

Other sellers on Amazon

New & Used (14) from $6.00

Image Unavailable

Image not available for
Color:

To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

Jay Lake

Follow

Green Hardcover – June 9, 2009

by Jay Lake (Author)

3.9 102 ratings

Book 1 of 3: Green

See all formats and editions

She was born in poverty, in a dusty village under the equatorial sun. She does not remember her mother, she does not remember her own nameher earliest clear memory is of the day her father sold her to the tall pale man. In the Court of the Pomegranate Tree, where she was taught the ways of a courtesan¦and the skills of an assassin¦she was named Emerald, the precious jewel of the Undying Dukes collection of beauties.She calls herself Green.The world she inhabits is one of political power and magic, where Gods meddle in the affairs of mortals. At the center of it is the immortal Dukes city of Copper Downs, which controls all the trade on the Storm Sea. Green has made many enemies, and some secret friends, and she has become a very dangerous woman indeed.Acclaimed author Jay Lake has created a remarkable character in Green, and evokes a remarkable world in this novel. Green and her struggle to survive and find her own past will li

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Lake (Escapement) makes a shift from steampunk to lush fantasy filled with exotic locales and exquisite descriptions. Sold as a child, raised and educated as a courtesan and secretly trained as an assassin, strong-willed Green retains her unyielding sense of independence, leading her to make drastic, unwise choices. Often used as a pawn and occasionally betrayed, she perseveres in trying to gain a measure of control over her life and a place to call home. Her goals become harder to reach when she's caught up in the machinations of immortals and power games of meddling gods. Despite an occasionally episodic feel and some rocky pacing that suggests it might have worked better split over several installments, the story is nicely powered by strong mythic undertones and a fresh take on the relationship between gods and mortals. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

Praise for Escapement:

"Lively and thought-provoking...Lake effectively anneals steampunk with geo-mechanical magic in an allegorical matrix of empire building and Victorian natural science."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Lake has configured his world-dominating empires, one British, the other Chinese, with huge and devoted attention to the last detail."--John Clute, Washington Post Book World

About the Author

JAY LAKE lives and works in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of over two hundred short stories, four collections, and a chapbook, along with five previous novels. In 2004, Jay won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He has also been a Hugo nominee for his short fiction and a three-time World Fantasy Award nominee for his editing.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

Memory

The first thing I can remember in this life is my father driving his white ox, Endurance, to the sky burial platforms. His back was before me as we walked along a dusty road. All things were dusty in the country of my birth, unless they were ooded. A ditch yawned at each side to beckon me toward play. The fields beyond were drained of water and filled with stubble, though I could not now say which of the harvest seasons it was.

Though I would come to change the fate of cities and of gods, then I was merely a small, grubby child in a small, grubby corner of the world. I did not have many words. Even so, I knew that my grandmother was lashed astride the back of Papa’s patient beast. She was so very still and silent that day, except for her bells.

Every woman of our village is given a silk at birth, or at least the finest cloth a family can afford. The length of the bolt is said to foretell the length of her life, though I’ve never known that a money-lender’s sister wrapped in twelve yards of silk lived longer than a decently fed farmwife with a short measure hanging on her sewing frame. The first skill a girl-child learns is to sew a small bell to her silk each day so that when she marries, she will dance with the music of four thousand bells. Every day she sews so that when she dies, her soul will be carried out of this life on the music of twenty-five-thousand bells. The poorest use seed pods or shells, but still these stand as a marker of the moments in our lives.

My silk is long lost now, as are my several attempts since to replace it. Be patient: I will explain how this came to be. Before that, I wish to explain how

I came to be. If you do not understand this day, earliest in my memory like the first bird that ever grew feathers and threw itself from the limb of a tree, then you will understand nothing of me and all that has graced and cursed my life in the years since.

The ox Endurance bore a burden of sound that day. His wooden bell clopped in time to his steps. The thousands of bells on my grandmother’s silk rang like the first rainfall upon the roof of our hut after the long seasons of the sun. Later in my youth, before I returned to Selistan to see the truth of my beginnings for myself, I would revisit this memory and think that perhaps what I heard was her soul rising up from the scorching stones of this world to embrace the cool shadows of the next.

That day, the bells I heard seemed to be tears shed by the tulpas in celebration of her passage.

In my memory, the land rocked as we proceeded, in a way that meant I did not walk. I had eyes only for Endurance and my grandmother. My father drove the ox, so my mother must have carried me. She was alive then. Of her I can recall only the feel of arms as a pressure across the backs of my legs, and the sense of being held too close to the warmth of her skin as I wriggled away from her to look ahead. I hold no other recollection of my mother, none at all.

Her face is forever hidden from me. I have lost so much in this life by racing ahead without ever pausing to turn back and take stock of courses already run.

Still, my unremembered mother did as a parent should do for a child. She walked with a measured tread that followed the slow beat of Endurance’s wooden bell. She held me high enough that I could look into my grandmother’s white-painted eyes.

Her I recall well in that moment. Whatever came before in my young life is lost now to my recollection, but my grandmother must have been important to my smallest self. I drank in the sight of her with a loving eagerness that foretold the starveling years to come.

The lines upon her face were a map of the ages of woman. Her skin seemed webbed, as if her glittering eyes were spiders waiting to entrap whatever little kisses and pudgy hands might stray too close. I do not suppose she had any teeth left, for her betel-stained lips were collapsed in a pucker that seems to me in memory to have been as familiar as the taste of water. Her nose was long, not so much in the fashion of most of Selistan’s people, and had retained a certain majestic force even in her age. She had no hair left but for some errant wisps, though as most of her scalp was covered by the arch of her belled silk, I suppose this knowledge is itself a memory of a memory.

There must have been a washing, a laying out, a painting of the white and the red. These things I know now from my experience of later years, learned upon the corpses of those I helped prepare for the next life, as well as the corpses of those I have slain with my own hands.

Did my father run his fingers across his mother’s cooling body to do these things?

Did my mother perform that ultimate rite for him?

Did my mother and grandmother live well together in the presence of my father, or did they fight like harridans?

So much has been taken from me. What has been given in return seems hollow next to the brilliance of that moment—the sharpness of the colors painted on my grandmother’s face; the rich, slow echo of Endurance’s bell and the silvery ringing from my grandmother’s silk; the faded tassels on the ox’s great curving horns; the heat that wrapped me like a bright and stifling blanket; the dusty, rotten smell of that day as my father sang his mother’s death song in a toneless, reedy voice that sounded bereft even to my young ears.

That brilliance is reinforced by a skein of later experience, but it also stands alone like the first rock of a reef above the receding tide. I wish that the past were so much more open to me, as it is to the blue-robed men who sit atop the shattered heads of ancient idols in the Dockmarket at Copper Downs. For a few brass taels, they will enter their houses of memory to recount the order and color of festival parades and marching banners in decades long lost to dust.

Distant memory is an art that absorbs its followers, immerses them in the mazes of the mind. I am overtaken by recall of more recent times, of blood and passion and sweaty skin and the most pointed kind of politics. For all that was taken from me in the earliest days of my stolen childhood, those distant memories would still be safe and sane compared with what has passed since, if their return were ever granted to me.

It would bring me the sound of my mother’s voice, which I have lost.

It would bring me the look of my father’s face, which I have lost.

It would bring me the name they called me, which I have lost.

My image of my grandmother is as bright and powerful as sunrise on the ocean. She stands at the beginning of my life. Her funeral marks the emergence of my consciousness of the world around me.

For all that bright and shining focus on my grandmother, she was gone at the beginning of all things. Whoever she might have been to me in the rhythms of ordinary living is buried deep within the impenetrable fog of my infancy. I like to think she held me during the days when my mother must have worked the fields alongside my father. I like to believe she crooned to me songs about the world.

These things are even less than guesses.

My grandmother’s last moments aside, what I hold most in my memory from those first days of my life is Endurance. The ox seemed tall as the sky to me then. He smelled of damp hide and the gentle sweetgrass scent of his dung. He was a hut that followed my father but always cast shade upon me. I would play beneath his shadow, moving as the sun did if he stood for too long, sometimes looking up at the fringe dividing his belly where the fur of each of his sides met and a fold of skin hung downward. The white of his back shaded to gray there, like the line of a storm off the hills, but always spattered with dust and mud.

The ox continually rumbled. Voices within prophesied in some low-toned language of grass and gas and digestion that endlessly fascinated me. Endurance would grunt before he pissed, warning me to scramble away from his great hooves and hunt frogs among the flooded fields until he found a dry place to stand once more. His great brown eyes watched me unblinking as I ran in the rice paddies, climbed the swaying palms and ramified bougainvilleas, hunted snakes in the stinking ditches.

Endurance had the patience of old stone. He always waited for me to return, sometimes snorting and tossing his head if he thought I’d moved too far in my play. The clop of his wooden bell would call me back to him. The ox never lost sight of me unless my father had taken him away for some errand amid the fields or along the village road.

At night I would sit beside the fire in front of our hut and stitch another bell to my silk under the watchful eye of my father. My mother was already gone by then, though I cannot recall the occasion of her death. Endurance’s breath whuffled from the dark of his pen. If I stared into the shadows of the doorway, I could see the fire’s fetch dance in the depths of his brown eyes. They were beacons to call me back at need from the countries of my dreams.

There came a certain day in my third summer of life that, like most days there, was hot as only Selistan can be. You northerners do not understand how it is that we can live beneath our greater sun. In the burning lands of the south, the daystar is not just light, but also fire. Its heat falls like rain through air that one could slice with a table knife. That warmth was always on me, a hand pressing down upon my head to wrack my hair with sweat and darken my skin.

I played amid a stand of plantains. Their flowers cascaded in a maroon promise of the sweet, sticky goodness to come. The fat stalks were friends sprung from some green jungle race, come to tell me the secrets of the weather. I had made up my mind to be queen of water, for it was water that ruled over everything in our village. Warm mud was caked upon my feet from my sojourns in the ditches planning the coming of my magical queendom.

Endurance’s bell echoed across the paddy. The clatter had an urgency that I heard without at first understanding. I looked up to see the ox’s ears flattened out. His tail twitched as if he were bedeviled by blackflies. My father stood beside his ox with one hand on the loop of rope that served as a bridle. He was talking to someone dressed as I had never seen before—wrapped entirely in dark cloths with no honest skin exposed to the furnace of our sun except the dead-pale oval of his face. I wore no clothes at all six days out of seven, and my father little more than a rag about his waist. It had never occurred to me that anyone would have so much to hide.

My father called my name. A thousand times I have strained in memory to hear his voice, but it will not come to me. I know it was my name, I know he called it, but the sound and shape of the word are lost to me along with his speaking of it.

Can you imagine what it means to lose your name? Not to set it aside for a profession or temple mystery, but simply to lose it. Many have told me this is not possible, that no one forgets the name she was called at her mother’s breast. Soon enough I will explain to you how this came to be, but for now believe that the loss is as great to me as it seems incredible to you.

Papa turned toward me and cupped his hands to call out. I know my name hung in the air. I know I ran toward my father with my hair trailing behind me to be tugged by the sun and wind. It was the end of my life I ran toward, and the beginning.

Laughing I went, covered in the dust and mud of our land, a child of sun-scorched Selistan. My father continued to hold Endurance’s lead as the ox tossed his head and snorted with anger.

Close by, I could see the stranger was a man. I had never seen a stranger before, and so I thought that perhaps all strangers were men. He was taller than Papa. His face was pale as the maggots that squirmed in our midden pile. His hair peeking out from behind his swaddling was the color of rotting straw, his eyes the inside of a lime.

The stranger knelt to take my jaw in a strong grip and bend my chin upward. I struggled, and must have said something, for I was never a reticent child. He ignored my outburst in favor of tilting my face back and forth. He then grasped me by the shoulder and turned me around to trace my spine with a rough knuckle.

When I was released, I spun back hot with indignant pride. The maggot man ignored me, talking to my father in low tones with a muddied voice, as if our words did not quite fit his mouth. There was some small argument; then the maggot man slid a silk bag into my father’s hand, closing his fingers over the burden.

Papa knelt in turn to kiss my forehead. He placed my hand in the maggot man’s grasp, where the silk had so lately slid free. He turned and walked quickly away, leading Endurance. The ox, ever a mild-mannered beast, bucked twice and shook his head, snorting to call me back.

"My bells," I cried as I was tugged away by the maggot man’s strong hand. So the belled silk was lost to me, along with everything else to which I had been born.

That is the last of what I remember of that time in my life, before all changed: a white ox, a wooden bell, and my father forever turned away from me.

Excerpted from Green by Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
Copyright © 2009 by Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
Published in June 2009 by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Tor Books; First Edition (June 9, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0765321858
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0765321855
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.3 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.4 x 1.15 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,023,989 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,763 in Steampunk Fiction
- #31,307 in Science Fiction Adventures
- #47,365 in Paranormal & Urban Fantasy (Books)

Customer Reviews:
3.9 102 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Jay Lake

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Jay Lake lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works on numerous writing and editing projects. His 2010 books are _Pinion_ from Tor Books, _The Baby Killers_ from PS Publishing, and _The Sky That Wraps_ from Subterranean Press. His short fiction appears regularly in literary and genre markets worldwide. Jay is a winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and a multiple nominee for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards. Jay can be reached through his Web site at jlake.com.

Products related to this item

Page 1 of 1Start overPage 1 of 1

Customer reviews

102 global ratings

How customer reviews and ratings work

Review this product

Write a customer review

Customers say

Customers enjoyed the book and found it enjoyable. They appreciated the interesting characters and their development. The book started well, with a fun world-building and interesting premise. However, opinions varied on the story quality, with some finding it well-written and touching, while others felt it had a disappointing conclusion. There were also mixed reviews regarding the descriptions, with some finding them fascinating and thought-provoking, while others felt they were too descriptive or didn't make sense.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Select to learn more

Readability Character development Enjoyment Start date Description Story quality

8 customers mention "Readability"8 positive0 negative

Customers enjoy the book. They find the story engaging and worth reading for the adventure, cultural descriptions, and well-developed characters. The setting is decent, but not outstanding.

"...This is worth reading for the story, for the adventure, for the cultural descriptions, and for thought-provoking ideas it has to offer...." Read more

"...Setting: a decent element in this book, but nothing to write home about. Writing: this is about the only bit of this book that has merit...." Read more

"...Her character carries the book. The world-building is also pretty well done...." Read more

"...an interesting world and very interesting characters that were well developed...." Read more

7 customers mention "Character development"7 positive0 negative

Customers enjoy the engaging character development. They find the character interesting and say she carries the book. The world-building is also well done. Readers appreciate the convincing female characters and the strong bond between the two main characters.

"...Mistress is the major exception, and there is a strong bond between the two characters...." Read more

"I loved the character's journey and development, and being able to go through the internal 'My Fair Lady' experience with her when she tried to..." Read more

"...Her character carries the book. The world-building is also pretty well done...." Read more

"...The book started very well, with an interesting world and very interesting characters that were well developed...." Read more

6 customers mention "Enjoyment"6 positive0 negative

Customers enjoy the book. They find it fun and interesting, with fun world-building. Readers appreciate the story, adventure, and cultural aspects.

"...entertainment value is way up there...meaning it was interesting and fun and I was surprised several times..." Read more

"...This is worth reading for the story, for the adventure, for the cultural descriptions, and for thought-provoking ideas it has to offer...." Read more

"...Still, it's entertaining. There's some fun world-building here, taking bits and pieces from stuff we've seen before and gently layering them..." Read more

"I enjoyed this book immensely, and while I think that it's imperfect I definitely recommend giving it a read...." Read more

3 customers mention "Start date"3 positive0 negative

Customers find the book a good start to the series. They mention it introduces a new world and pantheon.

"...The book started very well, with an interesting world and very interesting characters that were well developed...." Read more

"A good start - a new world, different pantheon and some complex characters. Looking forward to book two...." Read more

"...A good start to another series by Jay Lake." Read more

16 customers mention "Description"10 positive6 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the book's description. Some find it well-written with an interesting premise and thought-provoking ideas. They appreciate the depth of the themes and information provided. Others feel the descriptions are too detailed and there is vagueness or disconnection in parts of the plot.

"...bc tho the entertainment value is way up there...meaning it was interesting and fun and I was surprised several times..." Read more

"...Beyond the voice, though, I also liked an underlying depth to this section, the themes it dealt with, including identity, slavery, and..." Read more

"...This is worth reading for the story, for the adventure, for the cultural descriptions, and for thought-provoking ideas it has to offer...." Read more

"...be made by anyone without world experience- and yet she fails to explain her reasoning or why we should listen to her...." Read more

16 customers mention "Story quality"9 positive7 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the story quality. Some find it well-written and autobiographical, describing it as an excellent fantasy novel with complex morality. Others feel the overall plot lacks the main character's depth and is disappointing after having been gripped by the book early on.

"...I loved the way gods and magic were described, and how powerful belief could be in this world, and I loved the ending...." Read more

"...Just some vagueness and well it is not a literary masterpiece...." Read more

"...But the story is told in first-person and is very much auto-biographical...." Read more

"...Very well written, set in a fascinating universe, and features a strong female lead. I'd give it more stars if I could!" Read more

Sort by reviews type

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Dredizzle da Wizurd.
Idk whatever I liked it lol
Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2016
Verified Purchase
I wavered between liked and loved bc tho the entertainment value is way up there...meaning it was interesting and fun and I was surprised several times (I always know what is going to happen in a book, so that was cool) there were some points I was a little less impressed with. Just some vagueness and well it is not a literary masterpiece. But if you are into these types of books you can usually put down the pretentious judgment for the length of the book. I love fantasy/scifi so I give not only a pass but an A. (side note ya i am a feminist and I see where some might have issues with some of the plot but I think he makes up for it with the complexities of his female characters. Further not every book can be based in a society where equality is valued and or a matriarchy bc if they did then what would the MC have to struggle against ) idk whatever i liked it.

Read more

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Report
Dawn Earp
Lovely Store & sanity Saver
Reviewed in the United States on March 8, 2011
Verified Purchase
This story was my sanity saver on a work trip, and I highly recommend it. The story of Green and the world she inhabits is not necessarily a nice world. In fact, it is specifically a world where the strong oppress the weak. But Green is stronger than she appears and learns to exist and resist the world.

The language employed by Lake sings. Whether it is describing the texture of a fine silk, the blood washing down the drain from a vanquished enemy, or the breath and life of the cities Green visits. If you are someone who loves language and prose this is a great example of Lake's skill. Green is an exceptionally interesting character, and the reader inhabits her head. She is not necessarily the most believable character, but it is very hard to write a believable exceptional child character. Lake gives in to the same demands that Card did for Ender, and wrote a character who is wonderful to inhabit and makes sense, until you remember that she is fourteen or so. Even given the harsher maturation Green is forced to endure and her clear exceptional intelligence and physical grace, there are moments of clashes, but they are vastly overshadowed by the enjoyment of her character.

The other characters are not as strong Green, but to an extent that is because Green has very little empathy/awareness of those who are not her and she is the viewpoint character. The Dancing Mistress is the major exception, and there is a strong bond between the two characters. I recommend the companion short story A Water Matter for those that wish to explore the Dancing Mistress further.

The only major issue I have with Green is the feeling that it could have been slowed down. There are 3 major arcs in Green's story, and each could have potentially been its own novel which would have allowed for external character development and deeper delving into what is clearly an interesting world. I suspect this was a conscious choice on Lake's part to avoid the Fat Trilogy of Fantasy doom. Which I can respect, certainly, but I wanted to explore more of the underlying mythos of Copper Downs. I wanted to understand more about the Lily Goddess and character of that city. I wanted more information about the Hunt and catlike race to which the Dancing Mistress belonged.

Read more

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Report
B. Capossere
weak three disappointing, as was trilogy on the whole
Reviewed in the United States on May 21, 2013
Verified Purchase
Green, by Jay Lake, follows the sometimes horrific, sometimes savage, sometimes victorious story of its titular first-person narrator. As a toddler, Green (that only becomes her name well into the novel) is sold off by her single-parent father and taken by ship from her vaguely Southeast-Asian country to the city of Copper Downs, a cold northern kingdom full of pale-skinned people. Over a little more than a dozen years, she discovers the purpose behind her training, returns home, trains to be an assassin, and faces multiple gods.

Lake divides his novel into three major sections. First is Green's time in Copper Downs, ruled for the past four centuries by a seemingly immortal Duke under whose rule some are beginning to chafe. There she is kept isolated in a walled compound and trained by various Mistresses (including a non-human known as Dancing Mistress) in a plentitude of arts and knowledge, not learning the purpose of all this until near the end of the section, which closes in dramatic fashion. Second is her return home to Kalimpura, where she takes service in the Temple of the Lily Goddess and hones the fighting/killing skills she had learned in the compound. Finally, she returns to Copper Downs where she reunites with some familiar folks (both good and bad) from her past and faces the consequences of her actions when last she was there.

While the first section caught and kept my interest, I admit my attention flagged as Green went on and I became less and less enamored with both the character and the plot points. But it did start out promising. Green's voice was one that immediately captivated me as she recalled one of her earliest memories:

Though I would come to change the fate of cities and of gods, then I was merely a small, grubby child in a small, grubby corner of the world. I did not have many words. Even so, I knew that my grandmother was lashed astride the back of Papa's patient beast. She was so very still and silent that day, except for her bells . . . My silk is long lost now, as are my several attempts to replace it. Be patient: I will explain how this came to be. Before that, will explain how I came to be. If you do not understand this day, earliest in my memory like the first bird that ever grew feathers and threw itself from the limbs of a tree, then you will understand nothing of me and all that has graced and cursed my life in the years since.

I was swept up in her voice and happily followed her through the mysterious training she receives inside the compound: cooking, arts and history (though nothing of contemporary times), how to recognize poisons, the physical training she received at the hands (claws) of the feline Dancing Mistress, despite the off-putting viciousness of the mistreatment she received at the hands of her main trainer. There were some plausibility issues, some plot points that didn't seem to hold up if looked at too closely, but these were outweighed by the authority of Green's voice, as was the somewhat abrupt/anti-climactic "big event" toward the end of the section. Beyond the voice, though, I also liked an underlying depth to this section, the themes it dealt with, including identity, slavery, and colonialism.

The second section, though, didn't maintain the promise the first had offered. There was more "action" in this section, but this meant a little less of that reflective, introspective character-driven voice that I'd so responded to in the first section. When that voice begins to interact with a wider world, it becomes more distant and harder to engage with as Green never felt emotionally connected to anyone or events. Unlike the first section, this plot also felt a bit more familiar to other fantasy novels. Another problem was that coincidences and implausibility began to pile up a bit more noticeably, and its dramatic ending felt wholly contrived. And the much greater focus on sexuality I found more than a bit discomfiting, not because of its graphic nature (though I could have done without the euphemism "sweetpocket"), its lesbianism, or its flirting with sadomasochism, but because all of this involved a still underage girl.

The third section widens the scope even more, bringing in a possibly-world changing event: the creation of a new god, in part because of what Green had done during her first time Copper Downs. The action ratchets up as well, with more fighting, and also more sex (still discomfiting). I never really felt a good grip on this section, partly because as mentioned my attention had begun to flag, and partly because the underlying premise all felt a bit muddy, unnecessarily so. It also felt very disjointed and arbitrary, without it all fitting into a unified context of worldbuilding.

It was a disappointing finish to a book that had captured me so fully so early; part of me really wished Lake had simply ended Green with section one and called it a novella. I plan on picking up the sequel, Endurance, but also plan on being less patient with it. Here's hoping it recaptures some of the early winning nature of Green.

Read more

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Report
Danielle Linder
I loved the character's journey and development
Reviewed in the United States on July 21, 2016
Verified Purchase
I loved the character's journey and development, and being able to go through the internal 'My Fair Lady' experience with her when she tried to return to her childhood home. I loved the way gods and magic were described, and how powerful belief could be in this world, and I loved the ending. This is worth reading for the story, for the adventure, for the cultural descriptions, and for thought-provoking ideas it has to offer. Very much worthwhile.

Read more

Helpful

Report

Top reviews from other countries

Kindle Customer 54468
Good solid, well written
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 6, 2017
Verified Purchase
Good solid, well written. Enjoyed this and bought the next two in series. Usually I read hard sci-fi however a well excuted story sells itself. I saw only one review up and this guy deserves more. Finished the 3 in a week and I'm back for more.

Read more
Report

See more reviews

Sorry, there was a problem.

Sorry, there was a problem.

Follow the author

Green Hardcover – June 9, 2009

Similar items that may deliver to you quickly

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Review

About the Author

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Product details

Videos

About the author

Jay Lake

Products related to this item

Customer reviews

Review this product

Customers say

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

5.0 out of 5 stars Idk whatever I liked it lol

4.0 out of 5 stars Lovely Store & sanity Saver

3.0 out of 5 stars weak three disappointing, as was trilogy on the whole

5.0 out of 5 stars I loved the character's journey and development

Top reviews from other countries

5.0 out of 5 stars Good solid, well written

Idk whatever I liked it lol

Lovely Store & sanity Saver

weak three disappointing, as was trilogy on the whole

I loved the character's journey and development

Good solid, well written