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A review by geraldine
The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk
2.0
this would have gotten 3 stars but for two things, one which is personal taste and one which is... less i guess
2) is less personally upsetting and more.... i hated the bee thing. i hated it so much. i think for every book and honestly piece of media in general you have to suspend your disbelief a little bit and buy into whatever story is being told to enjoy it but once it came to the bee stuff i just could not. bee sense?? BEE SPOT???
every time this came up it took me right out of the book and fully broke my immersion. i was so invested in what the council was going to decide for the town, what visions maya was going to have, the people madrone met and helped, and then i get to some sentence about "bee mind" and just had to put the book down. two thirds of the way through the book i was trying to imagine how you could edit/rewrite this book to take the bee stuff out and how it would be a stronger book for it, but then the bees became more and more integral to the plot.
like why was it not like... she could psychically tap into local swarms of bees to sense their mood or something and call on them but not like, ok she has a bee mind now too and a scar on her forehead where she can sweat a drop of honey and use it to do magic like. what the fuck was that. could not come around on it. cannot do it.
i liked the characters and was deeply invested in the overall plot, and it had a lot of interesting themes but.... yeah.
Spoiler
1) is i cannot handle violence against children at all. i understood its place in the book but i wish i knew this was going to be a moment before i started reading it so i could have not read it in the first place.2) is less personally upsetting and more.... i hated the bee thing. i hated it so much. i think for every book and honestly piece of media in general you have to suspend your disbelief a little bit and buy into whatever story is being told to enjoy it but once it came to the bee stuff i just could not. bee sense?? BEE SPOT???
every time this came up it took me right out of the book and fully broke my immersion. i was so invested in what the council was going to decide for the town, what visions maya was going to have, the people madrone met and helped, and then i get to some sentence about "bee mind" and just had to put the book down. two thirds of the way through the book i was trying to imagine how you could edit/rewrite this book to take the bee stuff out and how it would be a stronger book for it, but then the bees became more and more integral to the plot.
like why was it not like... she could psychically tap into local swarms of bees to sense their mood or something and call on them but not like, ok she has a bee mind now too and a scar on her forehead where she can sweat a drop of honey and use it to do magic like. what the fuck was that. could not come around on it. cannot do it.
i liked the characters and was deeply invested in the overall plot, and it had a lot of interesting themes but.... yeah.