Glenda Larke

I've been wanting to read this for 5 years, and when I finally got it - ew. It opens up with so much heavy-handed religious anti-preaching, I can't even. It's written in a way that I can just TELL that the good guys will be liberal and fun and happy and the pious are pinheaded freaks. I don't usually care what religious undertone a good story has, but ermagod this isn't a light aroma, this is sticking my head in a paint can. Go away, book. I need to open a window.

... Restrictions placed on a Fellih-faithful woman were not as stringent, as long as she did not commit adultery or tempt the menfolk with her behavior or dress. Jastriá had once explained that anomaly to me. It stemmed not from a more liberal attitude to women, but from a rather nasty aspect of the religion: women were not considered worth troubling oneself about. The Fellih-Master was contemptuous of women and the Holy Book was full of tales of their empty-headed, superficial femininity that was capable of neither piety nor scholarship. A woman, it seemed, went to paradise only if her husband accumulated sufficient merit in his own life to take her along with him. Rich women, therefore, often married more than one spouse in the hope that one of them would prove man enough to get her to heaven.

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