Oh, yeah. I love Florian. And I love Ash, which is very rare for me: I am almost never as interested in protagonists as I am in supporting characters. And the depth of the worldbuilding, and the way the initially artificial and potentially superfluous frame-story wraps around to become the other end of the narrative's time, and much of Gentle's language, even if it's a much less ornately written book than her previous novels. I love the entire religion of the Green Christ and the Mithraic echoes, which were there at exactly the right time in my life for me to feel delighted and deeply satisfied that someone else thought that mystery religions were too good to be lost to history as we know it. I do not regret loving that story. I just regret that she wrote the Carthaginians in some of the ways she did, because I can see they were such a irresistible alt-historical id-hook, but there are problems.
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Oh, yeah. I love Florian. And I love Ash, which is very rare for me: I am almost never as interested in protagonists as I am in supporting characters. And the depth of the worldbuilding, and the way the initially artificial and potentially superfluous frame-story wraps around to become the other end of the narrative's time, and much of Gentle's language, even if it's a much less ornately written book than her previous novels. I love the entire religion of the Green Christ and the Mithraic echoes, which were there at exactly the right time in my life for me to feel delighted and deeply satisfied that someone else thought that mystery religions were too good to be lost to history as we know it. I do not regret loving that story. I just regret that she wrote the Carthaginians in some of the ways she did, because I can see they were such a irresistible alt-historical id-hook, but there are problems.