Chris Adams reviewed Emprise by Michael Kube-McDowell (Trigon Disunity (1))
Review of 'Emprise' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
I first read this as a teenager, and it didn’t hold up well on a re-read: there are some good ideas but the world building tried to be more than the author could pull off, which lasted through the remainder of the trilogy. It tries to be set outside the US, which was a neat idea but the characters and culture act and talk like late Cold War Americans and Christianity is the only religion which is important enough to impact the plot.
Content warning: as was unfortunately common in that generation, one of the female characters is largely defined by a brutal rape described in unnecessary detail and continues to be in the plot mostly for male, and thus more important, characters to want to have sex with her.