I assumed this was a random small collection of short stories as I picked it up for very cheap at the 2010 Boston Book Festival, but this past week I was in a Barnes and Noble (resisting going off on a ridiculous rant about BN) this past week and it was on display with other ‘New Fiction.’
Overall I enjoyed the various short stories, but a lot of them didn’t really connect me to Boston, the feeling of Boston. Quite a few of them took the typical route – through the Irish connection or the crime, but a lot of them were just sort of stories that could have been anywhere else in the world with the change of a few signifying characteristics (and some couldn’t be). With subjects ranging from turn of the (18th) century dockside stories to Catholic priests and child abuse and WWII survivor stories to a financial district murder, they are broad and cover most of the city.
This book takes place generations after the last book which makes it both an outlier of the five books and a hell of a lot more confusing than it need be. As it has been generations, the stories of the first four novels have become legends and the legends have become myth and are religious in their overtone.
This book was better than The Ships of Earth, but again I feel as if five books was a bit much for this story. It could easily have been split into two separate trilogies, but it wasn’t so we get the somewhat disjointed story through the first four novels and what appears to be a fifth book which may be completely unrelated.
Of the three novels so far, this was my least favorite. It dealt mostly with the journey from Basilica to the original ships that brought humans to the planet of Harmony. It was bogged down in details of the travel and the minor arguments between the main characters.
In the second installment of Orson Scott Card’s five book series Homecoming we pick up right where The Memory of Earth left off. This time however we are not solely focused on the Wetchik clan, instead we learn about a new character Moohz, a great Gorayni general. Although the Gorayni worship differently, they still worship the Oversoul, but call it God. As we delve more into his story we learn his people were conquered and annihilated by the Gorayni and he is biding his time until he is able to strike a death-blow to the Gorayni empire and their leader, a self-titled human manifestation of god.