Green by Jay Lake

Green by Jay Lake


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
For some reason the cover + title had me convinced this was SF, and I had to read several chapters before I conceded that it was fantasy.
This was well-written, on the literary side. The world-building was excellent. The first part reads rather like a version of Memoirs of a Geisha, but then sort of turns into Assassin's Apprentice.  And it has a protagonist lifted from a dusty Asian-like paddy. It's got some feminist sensibilities. It sounds like a book I ought to love. But for some reason I don't. I suppose that on the whole I didn't warm to the main character, who is written as morally ambiguous AND in the first person. I think that is a tricky combination to pull off, and the author didn't quite make it for me.

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