Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

While interesting, this book had some aspects that really turned me off from truly enjoying how original and amazing this book is. The first and main part was just how my brain tried to practically revolt from how different the clones were and how they acted and reacted to things. It was very well done, but in such a way that I truly disliked pretty much all of them. The gestalt characteristics were very different to the way that I've seen them portrayed in other works and there was something in it that made my skin crawl.

As for the book though, there was so much that was great but it didn't do enough to cover a lot of the glaring oversights. I won't really go into the more technical issues I had with how humanity was completely undone but there were several major plot threads that were just abandoned and it became very irritating. The way that they displaced the original humans was fine but the way that it was set up was not clear that the plot line was to be completely washed away and that we weren't going to see or hear from those characters again. Then to do it a second time with the parents made me ready for it a bit, but it still seemed like the author left a lot just hanging and wrapped up the story anyway.

After all this I really did enjoy the story, it just seemed that the author tossed ideas out left and right in the middle of developing them and then would just forget about everything else except what was immediately being written about. I have so many questions about the viability of several of her ideas that I just have to toss out because the book is over and I have to just shrug and come to terms with the fact that I won't know. I liked the way they used these characters to express some great concepts on idividualism and humanism but in the end I thought the book wasn't the best.