TITLE: Mort(e)

AUTHOR: Robert Repino

____________________________

DESCRIPTION:

"After the “war with no name” a cat assassin searches for his lost love in Repino’s strange, moving sci-fi epic that channels both Homeward Bound and A Canticle for Leibowitz. The “war with no name” has begun, with human extinction as its goal. The instigator of this war is the Colony, a race of intelligent ants who, for thousands of years, have been silently building an army that would forever eradicate the destructive, oppressive humans. Under the Colony's watchful eye, this utopia will be free of the humans' penchant for violence, exploitation and religious superstition. As a final step in the war effort, the Colony uses its strange technology to transform the surface animals into high-functioning two-legged beings who rise up to kill their masters. Former housecat turned war hero, Mort(e) is famous for taking on the most dangerous missions and fighting the dreaded human bio-weapon EMSAH. But the true motivation behind his recklessness is his ongoing search for a pre-transformation friend—a dog named Sheba. When he receives a mysterious message from the dwindling human resistance claiming Sheba is alive, he begins a journey that will take him from the remaining human strongholds to the heart of the Colony, where he will discover the source of EMSAH and the ultimate fate of all of earth's creatures."

_________________________________

REVIEW:

This is a book about a cat and a dog, ... and ants (giant vengeful ants!). Also friendship/love. This novel has an interesting and original concept but sometimes I wished for more plausibility (I'm not talking about the giant ants), and something more. Something was just missing. In the end I didn't really care that much about Mort(e).

Spark is a teddy bear sworn to protect her owner, or ursa, from the monsters that would seek to harm her. A fellow teddy instructed her in the lore surrounding the monsters that have been held at bay for decades, but has trained her hard to prepare for any monster that may show up.

Now a monster has started showing up, sniffing around the edges of the room, looking for a weakness. Spark overhears a neighborhood child has gone missing - a sure sign of a monster.With her mentor, a sock monkey and select toys of her ursa's friends, Spark must save the day.

For me this was an unfortunate misfire. The internal logic of the story kept coming apart at the edges and actual child predators appeared to be tied in to the lore by the end of the book. Not something I'd recommend.

(TBR Thursday list idea stolen from Moonlight Reader)

My actual TBR is, I'm almost positive, infinite. Or in more tangible numeric terms, is 1700+ books and counting- so says Goodreads. So I'll just look at what is floating to the top of my pile this week.

Having just finished the first in the series, I am feverishly pursuing the rest of the Temeraire books by Naomi Novik. Throne of Jade, Black Powder War, and Empire of Ivory reside at the topmost heights of Mount TBR.

I'm also slowly making some headway through more audio books. Once I've finished Devil in the White City, I hope to move on to either Mort(e) or Eighty Days. I tend to prefer non-fiction for my audio choices, but Mort(e) is just too interesting (and too free on Scribd) to pass by.

I'm also hoping to tackle some nonfiction about Sylvia Plath, though I'm torn between Mad Girl's Love Song and Pain, Parties, Work (both about her early, pre-Ted days).

Last but not least, a perennially present library book (I keep checking it out and putting it off), Bookmarked: Reading My Way from Hollywood to Brooklyn. I'm determined to actually read it before it's due date on the 18th. I love books about books.

It's the end of the world as we know it and he wanders the deserted city looking for his lost friend Sheba, for food, and . . . "He read what he could find, and felt the list of words growing inside his head like weeds, like fungus – – a simile he used after reading a biology textbook. There were several buildings in the city with walls of books rising to the ceiling. Among these volumes he found a few that he liked, stories of knights and dragons. There were comic books, too, along with books filled with numbers and equations.

It was so alien, acquiring information this way.  It almost felt like theft, and sometimes he would read a passage and expect the words to be gone from the page, absorbed by his mind. He also felt that he was wasting valuable time. He was reading picture books about men wearing capes while Sheba lay dying somewhere.  

But he could hardly get enough of the text. He slept less and less because he could not wait to read again. He would often feel intense relief to find that  the books he had left nearby were still there when he opened his eyes."

(My bold.)

Page 48 of 356

"After years of study, the (ant) Queen found human language to be a primitive and self defeating form of communication, light-years behind the instantaneous clarity and subtle nuance of her chemicals.

Human speech could mean everything and nothing at once. How could a species procreate, build, innovate, and survive with such an appallingly inadequate system, she wondered.  It was the study of language that made the Queen realize how easy it would be to turn the humans against themselves.  

Homo sapiens had a weakness for their language, a sort of gullibility. . . They had to rely on the faulty memory of storytellers, the biased interpretations of scribes, and the whims of inefficient bureaucrats in order to pass down their collected knowledge. . . They were merely talking monkeys, an unfortunate abnormality staining the elegance of the animal kingdom, and the entire world was worse off for it."

[page 40 of 358 -- I almost stopped reading on page 16 because of the scene with puppies, but after all, I think I'm going to like it.  For those of you who don't like talking animals, you'll probably want to give this a miss.]