A Jane Yolen that reads like an [a:Ursula K. LeGuin|874602|Ursula K. Le Guin|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1244291425p2/874602.jpg], how curious! Of course, it doesn't actually read like an Ursula LeGuin, it merely resembles her greatly in form; the book is presented in the form of a series of documents, recordings, and debriefings, concerning the contact of anthropologists (xenologists?) with the people on the planet L'Lal'loria. The book explores their "grief-centred culture [which is:] as much art as religion," and Lina-Lania, chief griever to the Queen.

I'm just going to get this right out there; this was a slow, haunting book to read, and after I was finished it annoyed me to hell. The book seems to believe it was about grief, but I would disagree: the culture did not actually focus on grief as such, (that is, the loss to the living) but rather memorialized and celebrated the dead, for whom the only proper attitude could be mourning.

(I'm not sure I'm making this distinction well, and I hope no one reading this is recently bereaved, but grief is really a selfish emotion, it seems to me, in much the same way that love can be. When we grieve, it's about what we have lost. I don't mean to say grief is bad, it's just that it's about one's own hurts, and a culture actually organized around grief seems to me monumentally narcissistic and maladaptive.)

Despite that they weren't really making "grief" into an art-form, it made me want to clobber them. The only thing they could really look forward to was their deaths, when they would have their bid at real immortality, if their griever was skilled enough.

The rest of the book is your bog standard "Our two cultures were destined to meet in tragedy" story, which, don't get me wrong, takes skill to carry off, but I'm not quite sure if there's anything deeper underneath it. LeGuin is an anthropologist, her books are always about societies; I'm not quite sure what this book is about, if anything.

Filed under enjoyable to read, frustrating to contemplate. Karen Aich, you won't like it for stylistic reasons.