Gibbon's Decline and Fall by Sheri S. Tepper

Mortification Scale: 2 Tomato Faces

• 1 TF for SciFi/Fantasy
• 2nd TF for really over-the-top feminism

Mitigating Features:

• Excellent discussion of anti-woman events and feelings
• Another original work
• A few good scientific ideas
  

Synopsis:

This was actually my third time reading this book, and I didn't like it quite as much as I had at the first and second reading. After finishing The Awakeners, I wanted to read more Tepper and picked this one.

My reading of this book is that it is Sheri's take on the typical women's subgenre of the college group book. You know, the book where the group of women meets in college and then we follow their lives over the course of the next 20-50 years? It's a fairly popular formula, most famously exemplified in The Group, which was made into a film with Candice Bergen, etc. This is the story of one of those groups if the central member of the group happened to be a member of a parthenogenic alien race sent on an anthropological mission. :)

Between the radical lawyer, the fashion buyer turned philanthropist, the molecular biologist, the sculptor, the nun and the doctor (the 6 human members of the group), it's a fairly representational and impressive group. Together they take on the legal defense of a young girl who was gang-raped and then dumped her resulting offspring in a dumpster. The group also tracks down their friend Sophy's hometown and discover the truth about who she was. That is when they discover the force behind the systematic oppression of women that has been going on for a thousand years.

This book is a little less engrossing than Ms. Tepper's other works, mainly due to the Earth-now setting. Some things are a little different, for example, sleep pods for criminal offenders, but most of the setting/world is the same as this world. I do really like a few of the characters. I admire the author's ability to write admirable and unlikable characters. The nun drives me crazy, and in the act of wanting to shake her, I'm falling into the reality of the book. Interesting. This book is not for everyone, but I give it 2 thumbs up!