Author: Jill Shultz
Publisher: warty!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.
This novel started out well, but in the end lost my favor and never regained it. I found myself skipping page after page in the last 30 - 50% because it just wasn't interesting. Let me get one minor pet peeve out of the way before i begin. On page 93, I read: "She slid her hand up his bicep..." It's 'biceps', and the weird thing is that unlike all-too-many YA authors I've been reading lately, this author gets it elsewhere in the novel. Why it didn't trigger an alarm here, I don't know.
On a positive note, I loved the title: it was was highly appropriate! Through I normally don't say a word about covers since the author usually has nothing to do with them, on this occasion I have to say that this cover is amazing, and it was the reason why I took a closer look at this novel.
The main character, Amandine Sand is an acrobat. She's also a 'leopard'. I have no idea what that really means, because she's actually human, and in the first third of this novel, which bore rather too many confusing pages for my taste, I was not at all kept well-informed by the author. I skipped pretty much a whole chapter that went 'off topic' into a new set of characters because the entire chapter made very little sense to me, and I was certainly not interested in wasting my time reading and re-reading just to try and decipher what it was the author thought she was telling me.
I read novels for relaxation, not to have to rack my brain to figure out what, exactly is going on and what it means! It’s the author's job to lay that out for me competently, and while I don’t mind doing some work, there's a world of difference between envisioning a sculpture, and mindlessly hammering at a lump of rock in the hope that shape and form will appear. From a writing perspective, this is a real problem with sci-fi. Too many authors try to invent futuristic or alien worlds which are so far outside of our experience that they make no sense. The author then has to try and interpret their own story to we poor readers, so we can enjoy it. I see no point in that, and I've never been a fan of obfuscation for the sake of obfuscation. The other side of that coin is that the author's invented world differs from our own in such negligible ways that we look in askance, wondering why it's even billed as sci-fi, or 'futuristic'. I readily admit that it's a fine line to walk, but unfortunately I had problems with both sides of that coin with this novel.
I don't mind novels that go out on a limb, but when you're led so far out that the limb breaks under the weight of what’s being heaped upon it, then what’s the point?! How are you, in any meaningful sense telling me a story when I don’t understand a word you're saying, or if I'm struggling so much in trying to follow you, that I'm not even sure if what I'm getting was what you thought you were purveying, much less actually relaxing into a good story and enjoying it? After that one chapter which I skipped (which introduced another main character named Nikos), things improved, but when Nikos came back into the story, it was, I'm sorry to say, all downhill from there.
This novel is set in the future (in the early 2390's) when some humans have apparently developed some sort of genetic mutation which marks their skin in a manner evidently reminiscent of a leopard pelt. At the same time as this occurred, there arose a deadly plague. Because people, generally speaking, are so scientifically backward and consequently superstitious, the plague was associated with the leopard skin, and so the leopards became pariahs. Note that this is in the future, with advanced science in place, and yet somehow this bone-headed idea not only becomes powerful, it becomes an obsession, indeed a religion. I have to ask: if this is sci-fi, whence the science? This zealous bigotry, with nothing offered to balance it seemed a bit too much to swallow to me.
This takes place in a Dyson sphere named Penance, obviously not in our solar system. It was created by aliens, but abandoned for some reason. We're told nothing of the sphere - indeed, it's really irrelevant to the story (to say nothing of it being physically impossible to build - depending upon how you define a Dyson sphere, of course). Humans moved in (we don't get to know any of that history), but they apparently lost all their humanity in the process. Now 'leopards' are hunted and killed summarily by a religious group (why isn't that a surprise?!).
Amandine's dream is to work full time in the circus. She achieves this at an early age, and we're suddenly catapulted 17 years into the future where she's now a full-time performer trying to master the quintuple somersault, although for some illogical reason, she considers giving herself more height to accomplish this feat constitutes cheating. That served only to convince me that Amandine isn't so smart, but it was worse than that because the novel's own logic broke down here. Where's the sense in refusing to "cheat" by doing the quintuple somersault from a greater height, yet using maglev belts as part of the act?! This made zero sense to me.
There's further supportive evidence for Amandine's lack of gray matter (either that or a backbone!) in her actions. For one, Amandine is 'romantically' involved with a woman called Malaga, who makes no apology for her own at best thoughtless, and at worst callous - even cruel, treatment of Amandine. Malaga has many lovers, and apparently does not hold the same view as Amandine does about what constitutes a special encounter between them. She holds none of their interactions in the same reverence in which Amandine holds them, even commercializing some of them, selling the experience in her store.
Amandine puts up with all of this for reasons unknown, rooted in her blind infatuation with (a possibly older) woman no doubt, but this relationship terminates so quickly that I'm not even sure why it was included, unless we’re to learn from it that Amandine is a screw-up. Here endeth the LGBTQ+ portion of the lesson, because Amandine from this point onwards, is all hetero all the time. It's for this reason that I don't think that this novel ought to have been classified as 'Gay & Lesbian'.
Amandine is also involved in rescuing other leopards (since she herself was rescued at an early age), and in this she works with a woman called Sarah, who seems to have as little respect for Amandine's needs as Malaga does. Sarah interrupts Amandine's meeting with Malaga begging for help in running a rescue of some leopards, and Amandine caves-in, even though it will screw up her well-planned, but tightly-scheduled day. The rescue takes far longer than planned, further hog-tying Amandine. This made for a frustration- and anger-invoking start to the novel from my perspective! I was hoping, having been given this much, that we would get to see a really kick-ass Amandine turn up, but she never did. On the contrary, she went the opposite way.
By that, I mean that it was fine until Nikos came onto the scene full-time; then it went all to hell so quickly I almost got whiplash. Insta-love materialized out of nowhere, as it’s wont to do in these things. Amandine started behaving as though her emotional age was thirteen. The most transparently manipulated scenes began appearing one after another. - to get Nikos partially undressed, to get Amandine cold so he could hug her to warm her up. It became so bad that I could not stand to read it any more and, as I've said, skimmed the rest of it. I did not choose to read this for a rather cheesy romance; I had thought I was getting an adventurous sci-fi story. It wasn't.
One thing I really appreciated in this novel was the religious pogrom. That's exactly the kind of evil which organized religion perpetrates because it’s divisive by its very nature, artificially setting up one side ("us") as pure and chosen, and insisting upon a confrontational relationship with all others ("them"). That's why I say "Thank God"(!) that religious affiliation is dying and will likely become a minority position over the next forty years.
The biggest problem, to me, was that the story had nothing to do with the any of its setting, which begged the question: why? I have to ask why is this novel was set in the year 2392 (going into 2393) on a Dyson sphere? There is no reason for it. The same story could have been told in any year, past or present, so why set it almost half a millennium hence when neither the advancing of the calendar, nor the Dyson sphere contributed a single thing to the plot? (I have one question: how does the interior of a Dyson sphere experience a winter?!)
It was like the author didn’t really know what kind of a story she wanted to tell, and ended-up becoming entangled in several, without harmonizing the individual parts. Was this novel intended as a romance? It failed on that score because it was entirely unrealistic. Was it supposed to be sci-fi? it failed there, because sci-fi played no part in it, even though there was ambient sci-fi (if I can put it that way). Was it about racism or bigotry? This was the closest guess I could make, but even there it was flat and uninspiring. There is no reason, of course, why you could not feature all of these in the same story, but the more you try to pack in, the more top-heavy you risk it becoming, and this cramming-in of assorted themes is especially unwise if none of the parts hang together at all well.
The timing of the novel was also an issue for me. I mean, why set this novel four hundred years into the future when the time during which it took place played no part in the story, except in a negative way? It could have been set in any era, and would have been better set in the past IMO, so why set it some four hundred years hence? By 'in a negative way', I mean that although people have shown themselves to be racist and bigoted throughout history (and prehistory!), the dominating factors in our society today are technology and science. I found the premise that these were of no utility in this story to be quite simply impossible to swallow. This again begs the question: why sci-fi?! This story would have been better set in the past and not portrayed as sci-fi. For me it would have made more sense in that way, than it did in the setting we're offered.
While the author mentions that there were efforts to create a good vaccine, she would also have us believe that all of this advanced technology and science had not only failed to refute the bigoted claims of the religious nut-jobs, but that no one was even thinking of refuting the blind claim that there was a connection between the "leopards" and the plague. It was as though this baseless assumption was bought into by everyone, and I found that lack of dissent to be too big of a stretch. I couldn't believe that no one was pursuing this as a line of refutation.
The story is billed as 'Gay & Lesbian, Sci Fi & Fantasy', and I have to ask: where's the gay? Yes, Amandine was in a lesbian relationship when the story began, but that's given such short shrift as to be irrelevant. We see essentially none of it; instead what we’re asked to focus on is a rather clichéd YA hetero romance born of insta-love! As if that isn't bad enough, we're asked to read hackneyed lines like: "I want you Nikos. I want all of you." (p193)
This "romance" wasn't realistic. Yes, we can get insta-lust quite easily, but lust isn't love, not even close, and it’s as depressing as it is tiresome to see writers consistently and persistently conflating the two. Do so many writers actually not understand love or do they simply not care? Have they never actually been in love? Why do they feel the need to cheapen something so special, and so wonderful by so thoughtlessly tossing it into such a bland mix? Amandine and Nikos have known each other for what, a couple of weeks or so, and they have spent very little time together. She's just come out of a relationship with a girl with whom she claimed she was deeply in love. Vacillate much, Amandine?! The two of them (A & N) have done nothing momentous, and yet they're now magically in love? As if that wasn't bad enough, he's calling her "my love". It was quite simply unrealistic and far too sugary for me to swallow.
In connection with this, I have to say a word about the speech that's written in parenthesis in this novel. Like much in the novel, we never get an explanation for it, or if we do, whatever was offered went right over my head. I had to assume it was some sort of hand-signal, since there was no mention of ESP in play here. I was guessing that it was some kind of universal 'street' language, but it often made little sense, and it made less sense when we discover Amandine and Nikos doing this while actually having sex (I refuse to call it making love)!
Are we honestly expected to believe that in the course of this very carnal lust, Amandine abruptly breaks-off whatever it is she's doing with her hands, maybe in the middle of offering an intimate and passionate caress, to sign "I'm yours" to Nikos? I don’t really think so! And are we to then also accept that he immediately ceases whatever his hands are pursuing, merely to sign likewise?! I'm sorry, but this fairly reeked of a writing agenda getting in the way of realistic story-telling, and it threw me right out of suspension of disbelief. We have vocal chords so we can be vocal, not so we can keep our mouths shut in deference to sign language when it's unnatural (for those of us blessed with speech) to do so.
In the end I cannot recommend this because of all these issues I had with it. I honestly felt that I was 'lured' into reading it by implicit promises that I felt were not kept, and even when I resigned myself to accepting that, I was still felt cheated out of the story which this had the potential to become.
