On Tue, Feb 15, 2005 at 09:29:15PM -0800, Steve Brust <skzb at dreamcafe.com> wrote: > On Tue, 2005-02-15 at 19:30, Mark A. Mandel wrote: > > The sexual masochism of the narrator is central to her character and to the > > plot, but it is not the point of the book. The author does not dwell in (gory, > > juicy, sickening... take your pick) detail on those scenes, any more than Gene > > Wolfe luxuriates in torture scenes in his Shadow of the Torturer tetralogy. > Well put. That was my recation as well. Thirded. If anything, that aspect of the series is somewhat underdeveloped; it's important in one fairly vital way, but the reader is not really given the opportunity to understand why the character reacts that way, nor does that aspect of her personality grow or change detectably. But everything else about the series ranks very, very highly. -- Matthew Hunter (matthew at infodancer.org) Public Key: http://matthew.infodancer.org/public_key.txt Homepage: http://matthew.infodancer.org/index.jsp Politics: http://www.triggerfinger.org/weblog/index.jsp