Recent Reads: SILENT SONGS by AC Crispin & Kathleen O’Malley – this is possibly my favorite, and my least favorite, Starbridge novel all wrapped up in one. (amazon affiliate link)
The world it’s set on, Trinity, is my favorite of the Starbridge worlds/cultures: peopled by intelligent avians who speak via sign language and make magnificent weavings, it’s just… I love it. It’s a beautiful world, and the human lead, Tesa, is a Deaf Souix heyoka (trickster, shamanistic person). She’s my favorite Starbridge lead, and…yeah, I just love her, her story, and the world.
But I also viscerally despise the bad guys in this book. Which, like: I’m supposed to. They’re conquerers and colonizers with horrific population-control methods, but also they’re an amphibian species similar to extremely large tree frogs, and I just find them gross. I like frogs, but apparently human-sized frogs are Right Out. The first time I read it, I wasn’t absolutely certain they were intended to be frog-like, and while that was generally how I cast them in my mind, it was just…gross. I just… shudder really don’t like them. I am xenophobic to alien frogs.
Anyway, so I have conflicting feelings about this particular book. Re-reading it now is still…I mean, they’re bad guys. The stuff they do is awful. I found them very slightly less physically disgusting in this read-through, possibly because I’ve finally firmly fixed it in my mind that they ARE frogs and not some kind of horribly awful worse frog-like cousin thing (although simultaneously that’s exactly what they are, since, y’know, they’re aliens), but I still hate them and what they do while loving the world they happen to land on SO MUCH. The authors obviously did an absolutely brilliant job depicting them and the world, because I have a REALLY STRONG response to them, but maaaaaan!
…so there’s all that, and there’s also the fact that re-reading the Starbridge books will forever be a particular heartache for me, and because I love the SILENT books from the series in particular, it’s more acute reading them. I devoured STARBRIDGE as they came out, and dreamed for many years of being one of the authors who got to collaborate with Ann on a new one. In the year or two before her death, we became friends, and I admitted that dream to her – and she loved it, and wanted to do it. She told me even at the time that if we were to do it, I would have to do the heavy lifting, because she was so ill, but she thought it would be so wonderful to do a last Starbridge novel (or two – there were plans for a third SILENT book, too). In the end, though, we just didn’t have time, and that will always break my heart.
Link above is Amazon affilate, etc.