Rating: 
Summary: Great writer who can involve readers in any scene
Review: A colonized world develops a unique identity and culture. Years later, one of its citizens develops a unique identity as well, adapting to her culture by taking on the identity of a man. Soon, she finds that her gender-blurring actually appeals to her in ways beyond what her situation demands of her.
I love Mission Child as much as McHugh's more popular novel China Mountain Zhang, which received the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Locus Award for Best First Novel.
McHugh is a great writer who can involve readers in any scene, regardless of how much or how little action that scene contains. The language seems descriptive to an extreme, but she still manages to tie those descriptions into the thoughts and feelings of the characters.
Before reading her work, I read reviews that included complaints about her supposedly not focusing on plot. Readers can find countless formulaic, plot-driven science fiction and fantasy novels, but they won't find many original and evocative writers of McHugh's caliber.
McHugh's other novels include Nekropolis and Half the Day Is Night.
Rating:
Summary: Thought provoking and inspiring
Review: Brought back deep memories of my experiences as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Africa, 25 years ago.
Rating:
Summary: Quietly triumphant
Review: I loved this book, and have been recommending it to friends. I really identified with the main character's tentative but insistent search to form her own unique identity, despite other people helpfully trying to push her one way or the other. I also thoroughly enjoyed the underlying commentary about how people's lives get overturned when two cultures with different technological levels meet. This type of writing is one of McHugh's strengths; illuminating big issues through the very personal story of one character. More, please!
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent, close to "China Mountain Zhang"
Review: I recommend this book for everyone who enjoys the earlier "China Montain Zhang". For those who have not read McHugh before, start with CMZ. Whatever your choice, I very much love McHugh's description of characters and their dealing with life as we know it. Their living sometimes may appear to be aimless, but never pointless...
Rating:
Summary: A true survivor
Review: I was completely fascinated by this book. I very much respect how it raises important questions without feeling the need to provide easy answers. Here are a few: What does it mean to be transgendered without the benefit of transgender theory? Would Jan have been transgendered without the implant? What does it mean to live in a colonial world without benefit of post-colonial theory? Is it possible to maintain the purity of a culture? Do the missionaries help or hinder Jan/Janna by the imposition of their technology? Did they have the right to impose their technology in order to "help" Janna? Should survival be the ultimate, over-riding goal? Initially, Jan survives in spite of him/herself. Ultimately, Jan decides not only to survive but to live. I highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Challenging, consistently engaging novel.
Review: I was facinated by this book, I could not put it down. It was gentle, it was shocking, it was deliberate. It made me uneasy, it made me think, it made me want to scream and cry. But most of all, it made me lonesome. This is the most lonesome story I ever read. I have always wanted to go into space. Just to visit a space station would be sufficient, but the idea of exploring new worlds and new civilizations is my wildest dream for my children. Now I read a book that points out the lonesomeness of being in space -- a long way from home, forgot and forgotten, lost in more ways than I can imagine. Jan/Janna has even lost her personal identity. That she lived and had any sense of social responsibility at all was interesting. I loved the ending. How else could the book end but with words of hope and promise? The last 3 pages were worth the wait. Lyrical, beautiful, sad, and lonesome. This book says there is a lot more to space exploration and space explorers than action and adventure.
Rating:
Summary: A Very Lonesome Story
Review: I was facinated by this book, I could not put it down. It was gentle, it was shocking, it was deliberate. It made me uneasy, it made me think, it made me want to scream and cry. But most of all, it made me lonesome. This is the most lonesome story I ever read. I have always wanted to go into space. Just to visit a space station would be sufficient, but the idea of exploring new worlds and new civilizations is my wildest dream for my children. Now I read a book that points out the lonesomeness of being in space -- a long way from home, forgot and forgotten, lost in more ways than I can imagine. Jan/Janna has even lost her personal identity. That she lived and had any sense of social responsibility at all was interesting. I loved the ending. How else could the book end but with words of hope and promise? The last 3 pages were worth the wait. Lyrical, beautiful, sad, and lonesome. This book says there is a lot more to space exploration and space explorers than action and adventure.
Rating: 
Summary: Autobiography of a Zombie
Review: If it is true that the unexamined life is not worth living, then the heroine of this book has lived a pointless life. Everything happens to our first person narrator and it is all accepted without any sense of emotion or evaluation. Maybe the author intended this, but I felt I was reading the autobiography of a zombie. If the narrator didn't care, why should I? "Only connect . . ."
Rating:
Summary: More of a world-exploration than a plot-driven story
Review: If you're looking for a book with a plot, keep looking. While the author has created an interesting world, only glimpses of the world are shown, as the main character simply has event after event happen to her. It read like a series of short stories that were written about a character in different points of the character's life, then strung together the day before deadline. There wasn't much of an ending, which isn't a surprise since there wasn't much of a middle either. The whole book is all "beginning", without anything being developed. Which is sad, because there were a lot of good ideas mixed up in there.
Rating:
Summary: Not for lovers of plot
Review: In Mission Child, Ms. McHugh does an excellent job of creating a new and interesting view of the future of life on a distant planet. Her protagonist, Jaana, is convincingly written as a woman born in a primitive society trying to manage contact with advanced technology from earth and the people who bring it. The problem is that the entire book is little more than a description of life on a planet without a lot of native technology. The story, such as it is, is told in the first person from the perspective of Janna, a woman who is not really prone to introspection and has a tendancy to flee anyplace that might give her more insight into her own nature. Near the end of the book, Jaana starts to make a kind of connection to the wold around her, but she never really does. The book ends with the same kind of "when's the sequel coming?" ending as China Mountain Zhang, but unlike that oustanding book, I can't see any evidence that a sequel would have much more of interest to say. Reading this book reminded me in some ways of reading the first book in the Thomas Covenant series. The main character was an idiot at the start, and made it through the whole book without quite ceasing to be an idiot. Unlike Lord Foul's Bane, however, Mission Child doesn't have a lot of cool secondary characters that make it worth reading. In short, the plot is relevant only as an opportunity for character development, but the main character steadfastly refuses to change. As a result, the book is weak both on plot and on character development. The reason it gets two stars from me is that McHugh has created an excellent backdrop for a character who has some interesting attributes. I only wish there had been some coherent plot to the whole thing, or some real development of the main character.
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