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(More customer reviews)All good fiction transports the reader into other worlds. Good Science Fiction often does this literally, transporting the reader through time and space, over the moon and across the stars. Ms. Finch, a master storyteller, and a true master of her genre does this in her journey over "Sorrow Crossing" into "Not Here", a world of mystery like and not-like anything this reader has known. Three races, each alien to the other, are wedded to this planet, native to none of them, to unravel secrets that can only be answered there, on "Not Here". At the heart of the mystery is the nature of language, and all that language does to shape us and reveal us, to warp us and obscure us. The mystery unfolds in an exciting tale of revolution that is wed to linguistics and biology; Ms. Finch's background in Linguistics is evident in the way she allows us to watch the birth of a people's written language, mining the situation for drama, while adhering to what current Linguistics theory suggests about the beginnings of all earthly languages that she extrapolates to the universe. There is an almost Medieval mood to the world created, especially in the monastic life of the Frehti mothers who renounce their routine lives to devote themselves to "Reading the Bones", taking their Frehti language from the air and putting it into physical form, first on finger bones and then on rolls "...of prepared tree skin" in order to keep the Frehti story from dying-urgency is everywhere, for the race is also dying, their story increasingly precarious. No one is more aware of the urgency than "First among Mothers", the human child orphaned in the long ago massacre of the original human colonists. Taken in by the killers of her family, she is the universal cross-cultural product, yearning to be Frehti, but haunted by human memories. This struggle in the borderlands between cultures comes to a head when near the end of "First among Mothers'" long life, a lovely earthling returns to "Not Here" in search of a sister left behind in the massacre that swept the humans from the planet long before. The conflict is high, the story an adventure, the language more than lovely. One of Ms. Finch's strengths is her way of rendering non-human language in English but with syntax and word choice that makes it believable, alien, strange, haunting, and above all beautiful. A wonderful read, Reading the Bones is an exciting ride I'd recommend to anyone.
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This skilful and entertaining exploration of language and cross-cultural communication presents a portrait of sentient beings in the midst of discovering written language. The Xenolinguists are a guild of alien-language translators who travel the galaxy. Translator Ries Danyo is a down-on-his-luck lingster, so far gone he's hooked on zyth. Once a promising talent, he's fallen to interpreting for the deputy commissioner's wife on her shopping sprees in the Freh bazaar. But when a Freh uprising leads to murder, Danyo must lead the commissioner's daughters to safety on a journey that irrevocably changes the Frehti language and the future of Krishna itself.
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