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title = "Fledgling - Sharon Lee, Steve Miller"
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date = 2020-05-12
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[taxonomies]
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tags = ["books", "reviews", "scifi", "liaden universe", "2 stars",
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"books:2020"]
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[GoodReads Summary](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5585180-fledgling):
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Theo Waitley has lived all her young life on Delgado, a Safe World that is
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home to one of the galaxy's premier institutions of higher learning. Both
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Theo's mother, Kamele, and Kamele's onagrata Jen Sar Kiladi, are professors at
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the university, and they all live comfortably together, just like they have
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for all of Theo's life, in Jen Sar's house at the outskirts of town.
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<!-- more -->
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{{ stars(stars=2) }}
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First things first: I did enjoy the fact that the universe has gender roles
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inverted -- with women being considered "strong" and "intellectual" and men
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being the ones that want to look pretty -- and this is not throw at your face
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at every moment, although it gets explicit by the end of the book, but by
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then, you're already good with it.
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On the other hand, some things feel... weird. Not about the genders, but in
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the story itself. There is some great secret, something the main characters
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want to hide, doing a lot of schemes to conceal it and when it is said what it
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is... it feels dumb. Ok, someone is clumsy, but that's natural in someone's
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family and WHY THE HECK IS THAT A SECRET?!?
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Also weird are some dialogues. At some point, there is one character asking a
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question and getting annoyed at it at the same time, like he didn't like to
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hear the question he just asked. Some discussions just jump into conclusions
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-- in the right conclusions -- which, again, feels weird. And there is a short
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arc in the middle of it that leads absolutely nowhere. It is throw in the
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story, affects absolutely nothing and goes away without a trace.
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Maybe it's because I got the book from Humble Bundle and jumped straight into
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the 12 book of the series (the "Liaden Universe", although this is the first
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book about a sub-series of one of the characters, or so it seems), but I
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didn't feel compelled by any of the characters.
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