Kibou-daini is a planet obsessed with cheating death. Barrayaran Imperial Auditor Miles Vorkosigan can hardly disapprove-he's been cheating death his whole life, on the theory that turnabout is fair play. But when a Kibou-daini cryocorp-an immortal company whose job it is to shepherd its all-too-mortal frozen patrons into an unknown future-attempts to expand its franchise into the Barrayaran Empire, Emperor Gregor dispatches his top troubleshooter Miles to check it out.
On Kibou-daini, Miles discovers generational conflict over money and resources is heating up, even as refugees displaced in time skew the meaning of generation past repair. Here he finds a young boy with a passion for pets and a dangerous secret, a Snow White trapped in an icy coffin who burns to re-write her own tale, and a mysterious crone who is the very embodiment of the warning Don't mess with the secretary. Bribery, corruption, conspiracy, kidnapping-something is rotten on Kibou-daini, and it isn't due to power outages in the Cryocombs. And Miles is in the middle-of trouble!"
Review: So... wow. This book kind of makes me sad, because the Big Thing that happens at the end kind of overshadows the rest of the book. So that there's this whole book, but the only thing anyone's going to talk about is the Big Thing. Which comes at the very end.
Other than that, though, good book. The storyline was a little confusing for me, but I'm going to blame that on rushing through the book for the sake of devouring it. Doing that tends to get me confused.
Random thought: On most planets in this universe, you can tell that there's some kind of Earth-based cultural influence (the idea being that everyone originally came from Earth when they colonized all these planets), but the cultural influence in Kibou-dani is the strongest I've seen in this series, from the architecture to the clothing to the way people speak. (It's all Japanese, if you were wondering.)
Goodreads Shelves: addictive, fluffy, funny, i-have-the-ebook, i-own-it, thought-provoking
Rating:
This is one of my sister-in-law's favorite authors that I have never been able to get into.
ReplyDeleteThanks for a nice review...I'll have to ask her if she's read this one (pretty sure she's read them all)