Since I'm going to put out a free or cheap e-book pretty soon, I'm trying to get to read some of them. I'm going to review them from time to time. Not terribly critical reviews -- or rather, I'm not going to post reviews of books I don't finish, and I don't generally finish books I dislike. Anyways, I liked this one...

Deviations:Covenant (by Elissa Malcohn) starts with a ritual murder and cannibalism, and doesn't get any gentler from there. It is not, however, a gruesome or lurid book, not a tale of terrible wickedness. It is a sad book, of two sentient species in a terrible trap.

The Masari (I think of them as catmorphs) have a certain biological flaw. If they don't eat Yata meat periodically, they sicken and die. Unfortunately, the Yata are also sentient. This is guaranteed to be a problem. The people we meet in the beginning of the book have a nearly symbiotic relationship, the Covenant of the title: the Masari worship the Yata as living gods, and provide for them in many ways. On Meat Day, though, they go to the woods and hunt Yata -- giving them a dignified ceremonial death. When the Masari village has enough Yata meat to survive, the hunt is over, and over the next week or so, the successful hunters prostrate themselves before the families of the Yata they killed to ritually expiate the wickedness of their murder.

This is not, however, a stable solution. Some Yata don't find the Masari expiation and worship sufficient; they'd rather not be killed in the first place. Most Masari would rather not kill people to live, either. Some try to break their dependancy on Yata meat, with miserable consequences. Some Masari don't want to have to deal with the rituals, and would rather just have a Yata ranch. And so on.

This isn't a book of good and evil. Most of the characters, Masari and Yata, are sympathetic, and are doing what they do for good and sensible reasons. And there are a lot of characters, a dozen or so viewpoint characters, so we get to see the problem from all sides.

I give this one an enthusiastic recommendation. Interesting characters, interesting moral quandary, and lots of responses to it. I was expecting one of two easy answers, but Malcohn quite bravely avoided them both.

Caveats: the writing is a bit repetititititive; each character has to stare at the fundamental problems in the world from their own point of view, so we see them a lot. The book doesn't come to a conclusion so much as end at the end of a scene. This is the first of a series of six books, five of which are out (and free) on the author's web site, and the sixth of which should be coming out soon; I get the sense that the six should be regarded as a single very large work, and shouldn't be read independently.

And the book is sad. Things fall apart. Beloved characters die. Ruin leads to ruin, and, by the end of the book, much more harm than good has been done.

Which is all appropriate. The fundamental problem that Malcohn has set up is going to be difficult to solve. I think, from the title of the sixth book, that we'll get some kind of solution by the end, but only after hard work and much sorrow.

Just like most real problems, you know.

The Judgment: Well worth full paperback price, and I'm quite glad to have it for free.