A review by clauleesi
Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre
3.0
My rating: 3.5
One of my colleagues recommended me this book since it was supposedly a good sci-fi for fantasy lovers. I work in a very nerdy bookstore, so I went immediately to the shelf and looked at it. The premise sounded so intriguing and I opened up to read the first page - a moment later I realised that I had become totally immersed and was actually a few pages in, which is when it landed in my to-buy pile.
One of the things that had me so immersed so quickly is how fascinating and almost mysterious this book is. We have this fascinating character called Snake, a healer who uses different serpents to help people - one of the serpents being an extremely rare alien creature, a dreamsnake named Grass. As she travels around this strange and wrecked world, events has her set on a different quest to figure out more about the dreamsnakes.
Let me just get the main thing I had an issue with out of the way - it is, as a matter of fact, my only complaint but one that I find crucial to any story where the world is not truly ours as we see it today.
'Dreamsnake' lacked worldbuilding. I kept waiting for it to explain if the plot was taking place on our Earth or on an entirely different planet, if it was post-apocalyptic or not, and how it might have ended up like that. We get literally no information at all about this. I think there were something about some places being radioactive, a different people that populated the planet before the people that do now (are they different? No one knows) and also there were supposedly intelligent beings living on other planets. I don't know. The things we do explore are beautiful and made me so curious about the rest, but they're also the mundane and ordinary parts of this world and I needed more backstory, more details and clues to what this world actually was, and how it came to be.
What McIntyre did do well, however, was how well she painted all these different people and cultures living in the places Snake visited. There was still nothing about how these cultures was born, but I found it interesting to read about how different the mountain people could be from the ones living in the desert. Also, everyone's look on sex and sexuality was incredibly refreshing - it was LGBTQ+ friendly and slutshaming was not even on the map. Unfortunately, there was also a lot of things unexplored here; the Dome people are still a complete mystery to me.
Characterwise, this book was very satisfying. Snake was an amazing main character - a confident, powerful and kind woman who often doubted herself but never failed to believe in others. She more often got angry on others behalfs than her own, she was independent but could also feel lonely at times, and also never stopped fighting on despite everything. There wasn't much character development, but only because Snake was such a complete characters straight from the beginning. She wasn't perfect - she could be arrogant and naive, but she was aware of this and fought against her faults and anger. I loved to see her interact with others; her relationship with Melissa was so tender and important, and I would've loved to read more just about Melissa. That girl was fierce and loyal and I just wanted to give her a big hug. Her relationship with Arevin though - that I didn't understand. I felt that their odd instalove had no part in this book and was utterly unnecessary. In my opinion, Arevin was possibly the most dull character of the story.
This book was also very slowpaced, but in a surprisingly comforting and warm way. It wasn't boring, just didn't have any hurrying in getting to where it wanted and when it finally got there, I was once again completely immersed and flew through the pages. A slow, nice burn.
All in all, I very much enjoyed this book and if it had been a series, I would've loved to continue on with it. Unfortunately it isn't, and I can't really look past the poor worldbuilding, especially not since it was a world that I so badly wanted to see explored properly.
One of my colleagues recommended me this book since it was supposedly a good sci-fi for fantasy lovers. I work in a very nerdy bookstore, so I went immediately to the shelf and looked at it. The premise sounded so intriguing and I opened up to read the first page - a moment later I realised that I had become totally immersed and was actually a few pages in, which is when it landed in my to-buy pile.
One of the things that had me so immersed so quickly is how fascinating and almost mysterious this book is. We have this fascinating character called Snake, a healer who uses different serpents to help people - one of the serpents being an extremely rare alien creature, a dreamsnake named Grass. As she travels around this strange and wrecked world, events has her set on a different quest to figure out more about the dreamsnakes.
Let me just get the main thing I had an issue with out of the way - it is, as a matter of fact, my only complaint but one that I find crucial to any story where the world is not truly ours as we see it today.
'Dreamsnake' lacked worldbuilding. I kept waiting for it to explain if the plot was taking place on our Earth or on an entirely different planet, if it was post-apocalyptic or not, and how it might have ended up like that. We get literally no information at all about this. I think there were something about some places being radioactive, a different people that populated the planet before the people that do now (are they different? No one knows) and also there were supposedly intelligent beings living on other planets. I don't know. The things we do explore are beautiful and made me so curious about the rest, but they're also the mundane and ordinary parts of this world and I needed more backstory, more details and clues to what this world actually was, and how it came to be.
What McIntyre did do well, however, was how well she painted all these different people and cultures living in the places Snake visited. There was still nothing about how these cultures was born, but I found it interesting to read about how different the mountain people could be from the ones living in the desert. Also, everyone's look on sex and sexuality was incredibly refreshing - it was LGBTQ+ friendly and slutshaming was not even on the map. Unfortunately, there was also a lot of things unexplored here; the Dome people are still a complete mystery to me.
Characterwise, this book was very satisfying. Snake was an amazing main character - a confident, powerful and kind woman who often doubted herself but never failed to believe in others. She more often got angry on others behalfs than her own, she was independent but could also feel lonely at times, and also never stopped fighting on despite everything. There wasn't much character development, but only because Snake was such a complete characters straight from the beginning. She wasn't perfect - she could be arrogant and naive, but she was aware of this and fought against her faults and anger. I loved to see her interact with others; her relationship with Melissa was so tender and important, and I would've loved to read more just about Melissa. That girl was fierce and loyal and I just wanted to give her a big hug. Her relationship with Arevin though - that I didn't understand. I felt that their odd instalove had no part in this book and was utterly unnecessary. In my opinion, Arevin was possibly the most dull character of the story.
This book was also very slowpaced, but in a surprisingly comforting and warm way. It wasn't boring, just didn't have any hurrying in getting to where it wanted and when it finally got there, I was once again completely immersed and flew through the pages. A slow, nice burn.
All in all, I very much enjoyed this book and if it had been a series, I would've loved to continue on with it. Unfortunately it isn't, and I can't really look past the poor worldbuilding, especially not since it was a world that I so badly wanted to see explored properly.