Mortification Scale: 2 Tomato Faces
- 1 TF for SciFi/Fantasy
- 2nd TF for strong lesbian theme - not the sort of thing I'm comfortable having someone read over my shoulder on the bus
- Wonderful gender relations insight
- Excellent perspective on the modern way of life - eg. everything by the clock, working to escape mindless tasks, sucking up to the boss, etc.
- An agonizing search for one's true motivations - shuffling through layers
Book two of the Oath of the Renunciates trilogy, Margali has gone to the Free Amazon guildhouse to spend her 6 months of house-bound time with her new guild sisters. At the same time, Jaelle, Margali's oath-mother and breda (friend) has gone to live in the Terran zone with her freemate, Peter (also Margali's ex-husband), to serve as a female expert on Darkover in Margali's place. The concurrent experiences of culture-shock and alienation are extremely interesting. Jaelle's view of a life lived by the clock in which women scurry around sucking up to men and being treated as cogs is priceless.
Margali's experience in the guildhouse is a little more emotionally intense. Her exposure to so many lesbian couples forces her to delve more deeply into her own sexuality than she has ever done. Through deprogramming sessions with her sisters, she is forced to reexamine her life and relationships with men and women. She also begins to develop laran, the magic of the Comyn. All in all, this is an extremely tumultuous time for her.
Margali and Jaelle's sense of self and their relationship to each other is tested and strengthened over the course of the book. I have to say that I cried like a little girl at least 3 times while reading this book. There's a miscarriage scene that is one of the most powerful bits of writing that I have ever read. I read it for the first time with I was 18 and have revisited this book periodically over the years. This is my first time coming back to it in about 4-5 years, and it's just as good as I remembered.
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