Allison Hurd's Reviews > Remnant Population

What an incredibly sweet, different sort of book! I think this was a really strong experiment, and that it mostly worked better than I anticipated. I'm going to try to do this review without revealing the things that brought me lots of joy, so sorry for the vagueness.

CONTENT WARNING: (just a list of topics) (view spoiler)[ domestic violence, loss of a child, ageism, misogyny (hide spoiler)]

Things to love:

-Ofelia. Our main character is woman who is set on enjoying her sunset years, which you just don't see very often! I enjoyed spending time with her as she got used to retirement.

-The world. I liked how alien and yet how familiar it felt.

-Click-kaw-kerr. This was soo, soo well done, sweet, and moving. I really wanted to cheer for them.

-The exploration. Of the world, of the culture, of what it means to be an old woman, and loneliness and self respect. All of it. So wonderful.

-The resolution. Yeah a bit trite, but it fit so well with the overall tone that I ate it up.

-The epilogue. The perfect cherry on top!

Things I wanted a little stronger:

-The exploration of feminine hierarchy. There is A LOT of in-group misogyny going on. I think it makes sense, but I would have wanted to have seen that explored more, if we were going to investigate it. As it reads, I'm not sure whether the author intended for us to feel that, or if she didn't see it herself. It dampened my appreciation considerably.

-The pacing. We start off at a very "conversational" speed, and then, as so often happens, the events really start speeding up towards the end when the author seemingly hit a deadline or ran out of steam. I would have loved to have shown the same enthusiasm for the later events as we did for the set up.

-Some stilted/forced writing. Partially due to pacing issues, some events did not feel totally natural to me. I would have wanted to take some editing sandpaper to the rough edges.

-Summary ending. I don't stop disliking these just because I understand why it went like this. Thank goodness for the epilogue or I might have been grouchy!

Very glad to have read this. It does what I want scifi to do, which is make me consider new things, give me a jolt of discovery, of leaning over a yawning pit and realizing that there is so much more than we realized. And best of all, the author did this with humor and peace rather than the more typical grimdark stories of conquest and ruin. Definitely worth a read!