The Summer Queen

Bleaker than the first one (Snow Queen), this story reminded me of how Terry Goodkind flays one alive while reading. Vinge really brings one's emotions into play. Helpless anger over the Hegemony's utter arrogance in insisting on merhunts to obtain the water of life. Complete selfishness

everywhere. The poor Summer Queen was misunderstood by just about everyone.
Unlike the first book this one does not rally around an Andersen fairy tale. Instead it tells a true story of humanity. One can recognize our own country as the Hegemony, forcing our way into a "backwards" country, taking control, killing off an indigenous species because its blood contains the key to immortality, and introducing technological "things" that snare the natives. And oh, the politics involved!

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LibraryThing member worldsedge

Its rare that I complain about a book being too long, but I'm going to make that complaint about this work. It is the equivalent of a 19th century Russian novel set in outer space that just goes on and on and on. My copy had a tiny size font, but still ran to over 650 pages.

Still it was a

worthwhile sequel to The Snow Queen, meanders and all. We find out what happened on Tiamat, how Moon and Sparks get on, the mystery of the mers, sibyls and Carbuncle is all solved. Though the way they all of sudden figure out FTL travel was rather forced, it did allow readers to find out what was going on other planets of the Hegemony.

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LibraryThing member faganjc

Thanks to the introduction of power-packed character Reede Kullervo; a secret society; and ancient history, this book continues the ambitions of the Snow Queen without repeating them. Negatives: the timeline of the book is a bit hard to follow; ten minutes or five years may pass between each

chapter. Also, you want to slap both Moon and Sparks for pretty much the whole book. A whiny pair.

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LibraryThing member kraaivrouw

Great book & a continuation of the story begun in The Snow Queen. There's one in the middle, World's End, but I never liked it as much - I think I just didn't like the character it explores as much.

This is a character-driven book with not a lot of action. If you're looking for space adventure -

look elsewhere. Having said that, the last third of this book is so suspenseful that I almost missed my stop because I was reading it on BART.

Lots of levels and lots of layers. Ms. Vinge really loves her story and her characters and obviously had a great deal of fun creating all the different worlds and political wheels upon wheels. It was fun to visit other worlds and see what else was out there in her universe, but I think I loved most of all the bits and pieces of the people of Tiamat roaming around their planet amidst the Hegemony's rubble.

Interesting, engrossing, and emotionally engaging - this whole series is great.

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LibraryThing member Karlstar

I really, really enjoyed Snow Queen, but this book started out very, very slowly. It was very difficult to get through the first couple of chapters, in fact, there's where I paused and haven't picked it back up again.

LibraryThing member stephkaye

The Summer Queen is as amazingly complex and engaging as the first book in the series, The Snow Queen. I think you could safely skip the novella between them, World's End, since every important event in the first two books is summarized or otherwise alluded to here (fortunately for the reader,

since a LOT happens).

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LibraryThing member TobinElliott

Vinge is a fantastic writer, and she proves it over and over in the three books I've read so far in this series.

Does this one suffer from bloat? Hell yes, all three do. But this is one of the few authors that can pull it off, because the stuff buried under the bloat is priceless.

While so events

turned out to be somewhat predictable, overall, the ride was worth it.

And for all of you that bitched that the book before this was unnecessary, I hope you read this one and have learned to shut your mouths. This one completely validates World's End.

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