Phoenix Flower

Rating:
Summary: A complelling story
Review: The characters in this book are fascinating, and I really enjoyed figuring out what made them tick, and trying to predict what they would do. I could identify with the characters - I know people who think like them - and that made the story more real.

More importantly, the storyline is quite compelling - despite a slightly slow start, the book quickly becomes engrossing and hard-to-put-down. I found myself sucked in when I least expected it. This book has a little bit of everything - espionage, sci-fi, romance, psychology, politics.

An enjoyable read!

Rating:
Summary: A complelling story
Review: The characters in this book are fascinating, and I really enjoyed figuring out what made them tick, and trying to predict what they would do. I could identify with the characters - I know people who think like them - and that made the story more real.

More importantly, the storyline is quite compelling - despite a slightly slow start, the book quickly becomes engrossing and hard-to-put-down. I found myself sucked in when I least expected it. This book has a little bit of everything - espionage, sci-fi, romance, psychology, politics.

An enjoyable read!

Rating:
Summary: The Gods May Be Crazy
Review: This is a good tale with undertones of epic machinations of minor gods as they use a generally worthwhile human being to achieve a "worthwhile" benefit for all of humanity. At the surface level, it is a story of an intelligence organization's plot to assassinate a wicked leader in another country whom the agency fears will evolve into a mass murderer of Hitler proportions. The agency recruits an intelligent, beautiful young woman to be the instrument of the leader's assassination. She knows she is to get close to the leader - close, as in the same bed - but she is unaware of her "higher" purpose. The agency has implanted a bomb in her body that, when the moment is right, will take him, and her, out. I see strains of a Nature vs. Human Nature conflict in this yarn. Nature's highest priority is the preservation of the species, with individuals being mere pawns. Human military and intelligence structures tend to take their cues from that aspect of Nature. But yet, there's something in Human Nature that rebels and screams against being a pawn. Each of us counts. Rather than let Nature weed out the weak or weakened, there is a side to us that attempts to preserve the individual with such means as insulin, drugs, anticancer agents, surgery, transplants, rehabilitation, respirators, gene therapy, education, special training....All individuals are worth saving. A Hitler in the ER with a heart attack would, ideally, receive the same aggressive therapy as a Rennie Decordova, the heroine of Phoenix Flower. ER ethics vs. military ethics; Humane Nature vs. Nature. In Phoenix Flower's end, a demigod agent of Nature defects to the other side and is victorious, at least temporarily, despite the wrath of the gods. And there's a satisfying hint that what the gods have done can be undone.