Here's an example of a novel with an interesting premise and backdrop, but poor execution. The story is built around Tepper's frequently-used themes of human inadequacy in the face of more powerful aliens, and how humans must remedy their destructive and warlike weaknesses in order to be accepted by higher life forms. Meanwhile, the main premise concerns a lonely girl named Margaret who creates imaginary versions of herself for companionship. These alternate Margarets then become real and are dispersed throughout space and time, growing up in diverse environments and forming their own life histories, eventually following their vague psychic connections with each other to come back together for the sake of humanity. One interesting effect of this premise is how people who start out essentially (and in this case, literally) the same can grow into vastly different lives but maintain their original emotional connection.
But like most of the other reviewers here, I was flabbergasted by the vagueness of this novel's main plot device - the transformation of the imaginary Margarets into real people. Without a more robust explanation for this phenomenon, following the rest of the novel requires a huge leap of faith that is not rewarded. Subsequently, the novel's coverage of the lives of all the individual Margarets is very slow-moving and drifts badly from the main premise. With so many main characters, none are fully developed and all fail to become compelling to the reader, and the same goes for their generally directionless life stories until they start coming together for the finale. The novel is distressingly talky and contains almost no action, and even though the climax is fairly interesting it is swamped by predictable thematic explorations on the state of humanity. Tepper's imagination is still in full force, but this novel had the potential to be much more enjoyable. [~doomsdayer520~] |
The Margarets: A Novel Books In Print, Audio Books.