Amazon.co.uk Review
In
Singer From The Sea, Sheri S. Tepper returns to one of her most enduring themes: the destruction of the natural world by male aggression and greed. Humans have colonised many planets since the world-soul of Old Earth was driven out and the planet died. Many of those colonies are now struggling, their own world-souls threatened by the destructive activities of human colonists, but the ocean world of Haven appears to be thriving. Indeed, many of the rulers of this patriarchal aristocracy seem to be living for centuries. However, Genevieve, a young marchioness, is beginning to gather evidence that many of the noble women die young, under mysterious circumstances. When she and her father are summoned to court, she discovers that the Lord Paramount is ordering mountains of luxury goods from off-world, which are then left to rot, unused, in vast underground caverns, and she wonders what her low-tech society can offer in payment. When old Prince Delganor shows an interest in her, she quickly realises that more than her own safety is at stake, and is drawn into a struggle to save not only Haven, but the other colony worlds as well. In this compelling novel, Tepper has created a multi-layered society, filled with interesting and sometimes bizarre characters. The plot is driven forward by Genevieve's anger at the injustices she sees around her, and although the solution to the mystery is no great surprise, the denouement itself works well.
--Elizabeth Sourbut
Product Description
An accomplished student and heiress to a great title, Genevieve has been brought up as a Proper Young Lady, carefully instructed in the Covenants -- the inflexible laws governing women of her class. But she must soon take up the time-honoured responsibilities of womanhood: that is to marry a nobleman of her father's choosing and bear a child at the age of thirty. But Genevieve has another side to her: the girl who remembers all the stories and the secret knowledge learned from her mother, now long dead, the girl who yearns to heed the call of the sea -- though she has never even seen the vast waters that cover most of the surface of her home planet of Haven. And as her fate, to marry the loathsome Prince Delganor, fast approaches, she begins to question the ties that bind her: why noblewomen must wait until thirty to have children, why so many die in childbirth, while peasants thrive into their eighties, and, most of all, why she must wed a man she detests, rather than the commoner she adores. Genevieve must uncover bitter truths about the seemingly backward planet of Haven, and fight for the rights of womankind, if she is to save her home world from total oblivion.
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