A review by liliales
Etched in Bone by Anne Bishop
5.0
Short version: the best of the series, and a fine conclusion to a series of very interesting events.
I was out driving just after I finished reading the book. It's a bright sunny warm day after two cold extremely rainy ones, and I saw groups of cyclists, a man with a kayak on top of his car, another pulling four motocross bikes, a woman in a car next to me eating an ice cream cone—everywhere I looked people were enjoying a nice day.
I bet most of them are good humans. It got me thinking about how we don't agree about everything, but most of us agree on what a basically good human is, and is not. Yet so many humans still categorize others as, well, Other, by color, ethnicity, wealth, religion, and political view. What if none of those categories mattered because to some group higher than us on the food chain, we were all just one thing? Humans, spoiling the landscape, better for eating than for anything else.
What could we do to prove we're more than food and better than our land-grabbing ancestors? Are we doing that now? I think more of us are trying than it might appear. This book is about how people come to recognize their role in the fight against the "bad humans," and thus against the idea that we wouldn't be worth much more than a shared dinner among carnivores. And it's a story of how those people will succeed, and the Others they work with will succeed along with them, and hard truths will be learned by all.
I was out driving just after I finished reading the book. It's a bright sunny warm day after two cold extremely rainy ones, and I saw groups of cyclists, a man with a kayak on top of his car, another pulling four motocross bikes, a woman in a car next to me eating an ice cream cone—everywhere I looked people were enjoying a nice day.
I bet most of them are good humans. It got me thinking about how we don't agree about everything, but most of us agree on what a basically good human is, and is not. Yet so many humans still categorize others as, well, Other, by color, ethnicity, wealth, religion, and political view. What if none of those categories mattered because to some group higher than us on the food chain, we were all just one thing? Humans, spoiling the landscape, better for eating than for anything else.
What could we do to prove we're more than food and better than our land-grabbing ancestors? Are we doing that now? I think more of us are trying than it might appear. This book is about how people come to recognize their role in the fight against the "bad humans," and thus against the idea that we wouldn't be worth much more than a shared dinner among carnivores. And it's a story of how those people will succeed, and the Others they work with will succeed along with them, and hard truths will be learned by all.