Gain Soldiers Of Paradise (The Starbridge Chronicles, #1) Edited By Paul Park Conveyed As Paper Copy

an easy read for me, . but worth the effort. . has some great characterization full of antiheros who evolve dramatically as their stories and complex misfortunes unfold pushing the characters to their limits and pulling them into various modes of insanity as they fail to cope with a world of insanity and religiously ordained chaos.
The plot seems to play off of familiar social disparities in our own contemporary world, successfully making a mockery of various socioreligious dogmas most noticably the Christian ethic of demigoguery and Hinduistic caste devotationalism take to alien level extremes.
Once I learned to accept that this world has almost no trace of comparison to our own except that maybe I could imagine that these inhabitants could have been a remnant of a humanity whose ancestors migrated from ours, completely lost hope and began to manufacture their own kind of hope, which has by now gone terribly wrong since then.
. it eventually became easier to accept the extreme characters and their extreme cultural values or antivalues as realistic, I like how there is an element of occult/supernatural ability in some of the characters yet instead of this being so enigmatic as to become a central point of the plot, it is presented quite matter of factly as if it is actually no more enigmatic or advantageous to them as an unusual eye color would be.
this is bizarre. there are long stretches of this book where i am unclear exactly what is happening, there are mutants or something who act crazy, and they are at war with some vegetarians who have a strange caste system to their society, and then sugar rains from the sky

but Mr, Park has a wonderful way with words, and the story flows in strange ways, as you read further, things become clearer, somewhat,

still, the book is fascinating, Ugh

So, my husband loves Paul Parks work, and he has often read my favorite books or books I have recommended to him, even if he didnt always love them as much as I did so I felt like I had to give Mr.
Park a shot. But Jasons taste in books and Is dont always align, and I am sorry to say this specific book was not a fun reading experience for me, At all.

Its weird, because I can read crazy, dense Russian novels and enjoy them, but this little unknown fantasy novel gave me a harder time than Messrs, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Bulgakov ever have, I think it was partially poor timing: Ive been very tired, frustrated and my ability to focus is not great right now, so it doesnt make me terribly patient.


This novel is a slowburn, weird fantasy, The world imagined by Park is quite unique, gritty, In “Game of Thrones” fashion though it predates that series by a solid decade, seasons in this world last for generations, and thousands for years ago, a religious riff split society in two: one half reverting to a primitive, almost huntergatherer civilization, while the

other half evolved a complex almost Industrial Revolution society.
This half is ruled by a sophisticated caste system, controlled by religious authorities, The other half communicate mostly through music and song and lives without real structure, which makes them easily oppressed by their more organized and technologically advanced counterparts,

The narrative structure in the first hundred pages is choppy, and you are thrown into the world with no clue as to what is going on I got very frustrated trying to understand of what I was reading was meant not to make sense or if I was simply too tired to read it right.
It turns out that the real story doesnt really start until almost halfway through, so my feeling of complete confusion was not entirely unwarranted, and I was simply not in the mood to be left unmoored in this weird world.
Eventually, we get to know two main characters who year to break the theocratic limits of their society to make it more equalitarian,

I get what Park was trying to do here, and hes clearly extremely intelligent and articulate, but I just didnt enjoy the book, I never felt the atmosphere he was trying to create, I couldnt feel anything for the characters because I never felt like I got to know them, I felt like this was a lot of telling and very little showing and my husband thinks the exact opposite, so clearly, we read different books! With a due respect to Jason, I was just really happy to be done with this one.
. .

I will probably try Paul Park again, but I will need time and many palate cleansing books before Ill feel confident enough for it, I read Soldiers of Paradise for the first timeyears ago, I just read it again and am happy to say it still holds all the same beauty and mystery as it did for me as a teenager, This novel is so dense despite its slim size, it can't be read in a sitting, A few pages reveal a world of unlimited imagination to ponder, The characters are angry, hurt, fallible and failing people living in a corrupt society of such violence and danger and poverty and privelege that it might be our own.
Except, incredibly, it isn't. Soldiers of Paradise breaks all science fiction/fantasy rules, It is not plotdriven, nor simple, nor based on its environment, It is a painting explored, a portrait of a world so different from our own that it reminds us of all we should hold dear, and don't, evocative description of an exotic world uninteresting characters and uninvolving plot, Park's Starbridge Chronicles are an amazing example of literary science Fiction, The fictional world is as rich as Dune with its detailed culture and religion, The society has an extremely maladaptive caste system in which children are marked with tattoos to mark their place in society for life based on omens at birth, There are the antinomial outcasts who reject names and live in the wild, The plot almost gets lost in the richness of the setting, These books deserve a much bigger audience than they have found, Paul Park is really more of a literay writer, I think, He's a wonderful fellow to talk to, and very literate, He uses fantasy and SF as a way to touch on the themes he feels are important, If you're looking for space opera or heroic fantasy, for adventure, then Park is probably not for you, His stories are complicated and rich, They're worth the effort but you won't find them to be quick reads, I hope to have a more substantive review soon, but for now all I can say is this really blew me away,

It's my first Paul Park, and I'm pretty damned excited to see what else he's done, Dense, evocative, literary SF, reminiscent of Gene Wolfe and John Crowley, but definitely not obviously derivative of either,

As in the best SF amp F, it is deeply otherworldly while being strongly resonant with lived emotional reality, I remember nothing about this book, apparently, i don't think i could really tell you what this book was about, i didn't really care for the characters, Paul Park definitely does not give you any kind of pay off which i appreciated, the setting is unexplained and pretty impenetrable, and the plot meanders and frankly seems absent.
that being said: bravo. i can't imagine ever writing this book, and i'm not entirely sure that i'll read the later books, though i might, reminded me of a less verbose David Zindell, and not quite as cryptic Gene Wolfe, it was good. i wasn't blown away, but i was happily surprised that i enjoyed it as much as i did, i would love to talk to Mr, Park about this book. Where the seasons last for generations, winter is a hard time suited to hard religion, The theocratic Starbridge caste consider themselves virtuous wardens in a sinners' purgatory, reading infant cries and birthmarks to judge the unpunished crimes of previous incarnations, On the battlefield, all but nobility are denied medicine and anaesthetic, Only the Antinomials have endured winter outside this oppressive social system, People without language, eaters of meat, they are being driven from their lands in the north to seek sanctuary against the very belly of their tormentors, in the slums of the great capital city of Charn.
Here a Starbridge doctor and a drunken prince begin a dangerous experiment in compassion that will soon demand heavy sacrifices, just as the people brace for spring, with its flammable and suffocating sugar rain.