Somehow I never heard about this book until I read Sir Pratchett’s non-fiction where he references it. I don’t know how I could have missed this awesome story, but I’m glad I picked it up to read on vacation. In normal Pratchett fashion, it’s hilarious, provocative, and deep. In happenstance, it was also interesting to read about a small island nation that gets hit with a hurricane while vacationing in a small island nation that narrowly missed a hurricane. “Nation” encompasses two interlocking stories, […]
A sci-fi adventure on the evils of imperialism
After reading and loving the Silo trilogy by Howey, I went back to look for others of his works, and found Half-Way Home to be a fascinating and well-done novel in its own right. It is the story of a group of 15-year-olds who had been raised in artificial wombs aboard a spaceship, one of hundreds of such missions sent out from a future Earth to find and colonize viable planets. Missions landing on nonviable planets were abruptly aborted by the artificial intelligence (AI) controlling […]
A Feminist Post-Colonial Coming of Age Story
Set in the US in 1969, Lucy is the story of a 19-year-old who has just moved from the British West Indies for work and school. She becomes an au pere for an affluent family with 4 daughters and attends school briefly for nursing. This novel is her reflection on that year and on herself. One could read it as a sort of coming of age story, about growing up. Lucy is trying to break from her old life and especially from her mother with […]