[YIY]∎ Download Gratis Mission Child Maureen F McHugh 9780380791224 Books

Mission Child Maureen F McHugh 9780380791224 Books

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Mission Child Maureen F McHugh 9780380791224 Books

I come away from this book with a firm conviction that Maureen F. McHugh is an excellent writer. Her novels aren't overbrimming with heartstopping action, but she weaves delicate stories with intricate character and world development. I opened this novel expecting a slow-moving, dense story, instead, sentence by sentence kept me reading late into the night; I absolutely had to know what happened to Janna.

Janna is a teenager on a snowy colony world, growing up on an "appropriate technology mission," where offworld technology is carefully restricted as not to threaten the natural economic development of the world. Yet as all good intentions, the half-hearted involvement of the offworlders only brings the worst of modern griefs to the natives - weapons, war, displacement, plague, without any of the modern benefits. Janna is caught in the middle of all that, from bandit raids, to war, to starvation during a long flight through the snow, to refugee camps. Through it all, her identity slowly matures, from a young naive girl into.. not quite a woman.

The ending felt rather abrupt, although not quite as jarring as in "Nekropolis," and not unsatisfying. The novel just ends, rather than wraps up, but the decisions Janna makes in the end show how far she's come. I recommend this book to those who are willing to give up some thrills & excitement in return for fine prose and simply a quality literary work. Personally, I liked it a lot and wish I'd read it sooner.


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Mission Child Maureen F McHugh 9780380791224 Books Reviews

In Mission Child, Ms. McHugh does an excellent job of creating a new and interesting view of the future of life on a distant planet. Her protagonist, Jaana, is convincingly written as a woman born in a primitive society trying to manage contact with advanced technology from earth and the people who bring it.
The problem is that the entire book is little more than a description of life on a planet without a lot of native technology. The story, such as it is, is told in the first person from the perspective of Janna, a woman who is not really prone to introspection and has a tendancy to flee anyplace that might give her more insight into her own nature.
Near the end of the book, Jaana starts to make a kind of connection to the wold around her, but she never really does. The book ends with the same kind of "when's the sequel coming?" ending as China Mountain Zhang, but unlike that oustanding book, I can't see any evidence that a sequel would have much more of interest to say.
Reading this book reminded me in some ways of reading the first book in the Thomas Covenant series. The main character was an idiot at the start, and made it through the whole book without quite ceasing to be an idiot. Unlike Lord Foul's Bane, however, Mission Child doesn't have a lot of cool secondary characters that make it worth reading.
In short, the plot is relevant only as an opportunity for character development, but the main character steadfastly refuses to change. As a result, the book is weak both on plot and on character development. The reason it gets two stars from me is that McHugh has created an excellent backdrop for a character who has some interesting attributes. I only wish there had been some coherent plot to the whole thing, or some real development of the main character.
Maureen McHugh has outdone her previous two novels (Half the Day is Night, China Mountain Zhang) by a quantum leap with Mission Child.
Mission Child tells the futuristic odyssey of Janna, a young woman who undergoes many changes in her search for a role in life. From her begining as a child of the Hamra Mission, a low-tech culture on a world long-ago colonized by Earth, Janna sets forth on a journey across the planet when her clan is murdered by invaders. It is the first time Janna must come to grips with death, but certainly not the last.
As Janna travels from city to city, we see the colonization of the planet through her eyes. She encounters several different cultures, all vaguely familiar to the reader, yet altered by their adaptation to their new world. McHugh does an incredible job of presenting these cultures through Janna's eyes in a believeable way. McHugh's grasp of the narrative is amazing.
I rank this book up there with SF classics like Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. Definitely a must-read book.
I come away from this book with a firm conviction that Maureen F. McHugh is an excellent writer. Her novels aren't overbrimming with heartstopping action, but she weaves delicate stories with intricate character and world development. I opened this novel expecting a slow-moving, dense story, instead, sentence by sentence kept me reading late into the night; I absolutely had to know what happened to Janna.

Janna is a teenager on a snowy colony world, growing up on an "appropriate technology mission," where offworld technology is carefully restricted as not to threaten the natural economic development of the world. Yet as all good intentions, the half-hearted involvement of the offworlders only brings the worst of modern griefs to the natives - weapons, war, displacement, plague, without any of the modern benefits. Janna is caught in the middle of all that, from bandit raids, to war, to starvation during a long flight through the snow, to refugee camps. Through it all, her identity slowly matures, from a young naive girl into.. not quite a woman.

The ending felt rather abrupt, although not quite as jarring as in "Nekropolis," and not unsatisfying. The novel just ends, rather than wraps up, but the decisions Janna makes in the end show how far she's come. I recommend this book to those who are willing to give up some thrills & excitement in return for fine prose and simply a quality literary work. Personally, I liked it a lot and wish I'd read it sooner.