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.
Rating: 
Summary: The best Ursula Le Guin novel she never wrote
Review: Maureen McHigh's latest is not by any means a bad book. In fact it is a superb story of troubled adolescence and the uncertain relationship between low-tech and high-tech societies. The problem is that it reads like the kind of book Ursula Le Guin used to write thirty years ago back when she was writing her best feminist science fiction. In fact it reads so much like Le Guin that it doesn't read like McHugh anymore. This wouln't be so bad if McHugh's previous books had been bad, but they happened to be the best things I had read in ages. Come back Maureen!
Rating: 
Summary: McHugh's best: adventure, tragedy, wit, beauty
Review: Maureen McHugh has already proved herself to be the single best builder of lived-in sf worlds working in the field today. Her talent for capturing ordinary people is stronger than ever in Mission Child, but those ordinary people are living very adventurous lives. McHugh has added a lot of beauty to her always spare and graceful prose. This coming-of-age story features war, guns, reindeer, alien hi-tech, pirates, Laplander cyberpunk, and a cross-dressing shaman who is one of the most memorable characters in SF this decade. My favorite SF book of the last five years.
Rating:
Summary: A science fiction odyssey
Review: Maureen McHugh has outdone her previous two novels (Half the Day is Night, China Mountain Zhang) by a quantum leap with Mission Child. Mission Child tells the futuristic odyssey of Janna, a young woman who undergoes many changes in her search for a role in life. From her begining as a child of the Hamra Mission, a low-tech culture on a world long-ago colonized by Earth, Janna sets forth on a journey across the planet when her clan is murdered by invaders. It is the first time Janna must come to grips with death, but certainly not the last. As Janna travels from city to city, we see the colonization of the planet through her eyes. She encounters several different cultures, all vaguely familiar to the reader, yet altered by their adaptation to their new world. McHugh does an incredible job of presenting these cultures through Janna's eyes in a believeable way. McHugh's grasp of the narrative is amazing. I rank this book up there with SF classics like Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. Definitely a must-read book.
Rating:
Summary: A lyrical, subtle story, told by a master of the genre
Review: Maureen McHugh is known for the grace and subtlety of her prose. She does not disappoint in this latest journey into the developing heart of a young girl, coming of age amid the chaos of a changing world. _Mission Child_ explores the world of a pre-industrial child as she begins to cope with the destruction of her secure tribal culture and her exploration of the alien industrial environment in which she must learn to survive. I gained a new understanding for what it must be like to suddenly find oneself an utter stranger to one's land and even oneself. Jan/Janna is no great hero. She makes terrible mistakes, has good luck and bad, is blown by the winds of her own emotions as much as by the winds of change that sweep her world. But it is the triumph of her sense of self that keeps us rooting for her. There are no easy answers in this book--no cookie-cutter endings. It was a wonderful story. I enjoyed it very much.
Rating: 
Summary: Mission Child
Review: Mission Child grew out of a comment by Gardner Dozois, the editor of _Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine_. I sent him a story years ago and he bought it, saying the story was good, but that the world it was set in seemed very interesting--a place for a novel. _Mission Child_ is set on a lost colony, another planet colonized by Earth and then lost for hundreds of years. I was trying to understand a lot of things when I wrote this novel; what it might mean to be male or female, and why it seems that a culture with more advanced technology always wrecks havoc on any culture with less advanced technology that it meets. The first chapter of the novel was published in a much different form as "The Cost to be Wise" in _Starlight_, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden.
Rating:
Summary: Skip It.
Review: This book doesn't come close to how interesting China Mountain Zhang or Half the Day is Night are. The book is well written, however the story goes nowhere and the ending is totally curt and unsatisfying. I kept waiting for something to exciting to happen, nothing ever did. Don't waste your time on this book - I'm sorry I did. Read CMZ(5*) or HTDIN(4*) instead. Those books were MUCH more interesting and engaging.
Rating: 
Summary: Challenging, consistently engaging novel.
Review: This episodic speculative novel is a consistently surprising story about a young woman named Janna, her struggles to find a place in her world, and her identity in that world. A character driven story, it will remind you of LeGuin & Dickens, as Janna winds her way through an interesting myriad of personalities. I really liked the way this author handled the material with such unflinching sincerity and confidence, that she never felt she had to justify or overexplain the world, the social system, the character motivations, or the gender issues that arose. A prophetic book? Possibly. But definately for the thoughtful reader.
Rating:
Summary: Writing Mission Child
Review: Writing this book was difficult. I set out to try to answer the question, what do the haves owe the have nots, and I'm afraid I still don't know the answer. When two cultures collide, how can the more powerful culture do the least harm?
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