All the Windwracked Stars by Elizabeth Bear was the July book for the Women of Fantasy book club I joined.

From Amazon:

It all began with Ragnarok, with the Children of the Light and the Tarnished ones battling to the death in the ice and the dark. At the end of the long battle, one Valkyrie survived, wounded, and one valraven – the steeds of the valkyrie.

Because they lived, Valdyrgard was not wholly destroyed. Because the valraven was transformed in the last miracle offered to a Child of the Light, Valdyrgard was changed to a world where magic and technology worked hand in hand.

2500 years later, Muire is in the last city on the dying planet, where the Technomancer rules what’s left of humanity. She’s caught sight of someone she has not seen since the Last Battle: Mingan the Wolf is hunting in her city.

…beware, spoilers ahead!

I was really excited about this book going in, but I got to about page 230, put it down and don’t intend to finish it, even though there’s only about 130 pages left. The same thing happened with the June book, but I was so disinterested in that one that when I went to do one of these posts, I hardly remembered anything.

The description of this book, like the one on Amazon and the one on the back cover, made it sound like this was going to be a really interesting story. But sadly, I just found it tedious. I’m about 230 pages in and almost nothing has happened. There was a battle, a miracle, and now everything’s gone to hell. In fact, the description from Amazon is more or less everything that’s happened but with less detail.

Muire isn’t a very compelling protagonist. It’s hard to like someone who openly admits she’s a coward, but that isn’t really my issue with her. I liked that she was a historian, but beyond that, she’s just not very interesting. In any way. She puts on her armor, obsesses about her sword, thinks about her fall from grace, and doesn’t do much else. She’s realized that her fallen angel family is being reincarnated. And now she’s hunting the Gray Wolf, who betrayed her family in the last battle, but he’s not a very compelling antagonist. He kills people. They finally had a scene together where he kissed her and (I think) transferred some of his power to her, but it read way more like a rape scene than I would have liked and I found it rather distasteful.

There’s a two headed deer steed thing – a valraven. His name is Kasimir and I like him but he doesn’t appear frequently. He seems to be there to help Muire, but Muire is too stubborn to ask for help most of the time.

Then there’s the technomancer, who has strong magic and is holding the world together with both magic and technology, but there is something sinister about her too, and I’m sure if I’d read to the end I’d find out what it was, but that’s just not going to happen.

Maybe it’s because I started skimming about 50 pages ago, but nothing is very clear. There’s a lot of Norse mythology in here, and I don’t know very much about Norse mythology, and Bear never really seems to get around to explaining very much in the 230 pages I read.

I didn’t particularly enjoy Bear’s writing style either. There’s a lot of fancy description that doesn’t particularly matter to me all that much. Okay, we get it, as a “Child of the Light” (angel?) Muire isn’t used to feeling cold. I know what cold feels like, move on, you don’t have to continuously describe it.

The only character that’s sort of interesting, besides Kasimir, is Cahey, who is a male boxer/hooker. But he’s not around enough to save the story. This is mostly about Muire and her possible redemption (if the story went where I thought it was going to be going). And I think that’s the problem.

As I said, Muire is fundamentally dull. And so is the story.

Tagged: authors: elizabeth bear, book club: 2011 women of fantasy, books: all the windwracked stars, genre: fantasy