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Warchild

av Karin Lowachee

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Serier: Warchild (Book 1)

MedlemmarRecensionerPopularitetGenomsnittligt betygOmnämnanden
5551442,928 (4.12)30
Karin Lowachee's debut novel is the engrossing story of a young boy's coming of age amid interstellar war, a riveting saga in the tradition of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. The merchant ship Mukudori encompasses the whole of eight-year-old Jos's world, until a notorious pirate destroys the ship, slaughters the adults, and enslaves the children. Thus begins a desperate odyssey of terror and escape that takes Jos beyond known space to the home of the strits, Earth's alien enemies. To survive, the boy must become a living weapon and a master spy. But no training will protect Jos in a war where every hope might be a deadly lie, and every friendship might hide a lethal betrayal. And all the while he will face the most grueling trial of his life... becoming his own man.… (mer)
  1. 10
    Cagebird av Karin Lowachee (Anonym användare)
  2. 10
    Burndive av Karin Lowachee (Anonym användare)
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Visa 1-5 av 14 (nästa | visa alla)
I found "Warchild" because Tanya Huff recommended Karin Lowachee as one of her favourite science fiction writers. There's no audiobook version, the cover is depressingly generic and the title didn't speak to me. Normally I'd have moved on and then I'd have missed one of the most original, vivid and emotionally engaging science fiction books I've read in a long time.

"Warchild" confronts the reality of the damage done to the life of Jos, a nine year old boy who is abducted, enslaved and abused by the pirate who attacks his ship and kills his family.

The first section of the book is particularly hard on the emotions. Jos's description of his abduction and what happened during his enslavement is written in the second person, giving it a distant, disconnected feel, like someone reporting something that happened to someone else a long time ago. Here's an example, describing nine year old Jos' encounter with Falcone, the predatory Pirate Captain who has enslaved him

"He forced your chin back and looked at your throat, then he lifted your hands and inspected your fingers, your nails, your knuckles. Then he stepped back

'Take off your clothes.'

It was cold and you shook. You shook from more than cold. You couldn't move"

The distance amplifies the sense of helplessness, of wrongness and brutality in a way that breaks the heart and stokes impotent rage.

"Warchild" has an original plot and first class world-building. In any other book, I'd have been praising the clarity with which an interstellar war between Humans, Aliens and their Human Sypthatisers is described. I'd have placed front and centre how the similarities and differences between the alien culture and the human military culture are explored. Nothing more would have been needed to make this a good science fiction novel.

Karin Lowachee pushes herself to go further. She keeps the focus on Jos as he finds himself having to choose between two strong men, an Alien Commander and a Human Commander, each of whom seem to want something from him. Both men help him develop as a soldier. Each offers patronage and expects loyalty. Jos cannot bring himself completely to trust either man.

As events unfolded, I was shown that, beneath his shell of lethal competency, Jos is damaged: unable to sustain any kind of intimacy with his peers; unable to trust; deeply troubled by the things he refuses to let himself remember but which attack him through his dreams.

Jos becomes a soldier, regularly raiding ships, killing those who oppose him, capturing those who surrender, watching the people closest to him dying in battle. Jos does not get through this unscathed. He is finding it hard to hold on to who he is, to stay free of his past and of the pressures of his present.

Although the main body of the story is told in the first person, Karin Lowachee finds ways to reflect Jos' inner turmoil without using his interior monologue to do it. Perhaps the best example of this is the last chapter in Part IV of the book. Jos has been in a firefight in another ship and is returning to his ship "The Macedon" with blood on his hands and images of those he has killed fresh in his memory. In other dystopian novels, this might have been the moment when Jos comes of age and knows his purpose. This isn't that kind of novel. Karin Lowachee sums up Jos' mental state in a chapter that consists of a single sentence:

"I go back to Macedon with things in my head I have no language for. They are just hoarse sounds in a hollow drum of silence."

I was surprised to find that "Warchild" was Karin Lowachee's first novel, her writing is assured and skillful, managing to combine depth with brevity.

I was pleased to find that "Warchild" is the first book of a trilogy and that all three books are available. I look forward to reading the rest of them, although "Warchild" left me too emotionally frayed to move straight on to the next book. ( )
1 rösta MikeFinnFiction | May 16, 2020 |
This is another serendipitous discovery I owe to a book blogger’s enthusiastic review: a great book and an author I will keep on my radar. This was an incredible experience, because I’m usually wary of stories focused on teenage characters, always afraid I will find myself trapped in some sappy swamp, but this was not the case.

Young Jos Musey's story is a coming of age tale painted in dark colors: from his capture by the pirates who have attacked and destroyed his ship, to his rescue by alien sympathizers in conflict with the Earth government and from here to his role as double agent for those same sympathizers, Jos' life is a harsh one, fraught with difficult choices and the constant pull of conflicting drives and emotions.

Jos' dreadful experiences aboard the pirate ship have left a permanent mark on his spirit, most notably in his inability to trust: once he is asked to play the difficult role of spy, his inner contradictions come to the surface in a very dramatic way, enhanced by the doubts that start plaguing him about the possibility of being a pawn in the hands of those he has come to view as his rescuers.

This is Jos' main attraction as a character: his extreme fragility, hidden by the hard, aggressive shell he's built around him. There was never a single moment when I did not feel a deep sympathy for him, and the main reason is that Karin Lowachee's writing – with its plain, pared-to-essentials narrative – never indulges in long descriptions or graphic details, but rather carries her readers along on an endless stream of powerful emotions.

One of the details I loved more is the way characters (all of them) change and evolve, not only inside the story’s framework, but also from the reader’s point of view”. There are no clichés in Lowachee’s writing, no fixed molds: she managed to surprise me at every turn of the corner, and I appreciate that greatly. ( )
2 rösta SpaceandSorcery | Dec 25, 2018 |
Rarely do I award 5 stars to anything, but [War Child] deserves them. A sci fi book that delves into the horrors of child abuse and looks at how it colors their lives from thereon out. There are triggers for child abuse here, certainly, but it is handled carefully and in a non-exploitative manner. Kudos to Karin Lowachee for a masteful job.

Along with the obvious, the tale is a space opera with a lot of action, a complex plot, and incredibly thoughtful character development. No paper cutout characters in this tale. ( )
1 rösta majkia | Oct 20, 2016 |
Trigger warning for rape and child abuse

Warchild was an absolutely brutal book. When you look at the thematic material – the effects of war on children’s psychology – it’s no wonder.

Warchild takes place against the background of war between humans and aliens and some humans who sympathize with them. Yet, Warchild is an intensely character based novel centered around Jos, who ages from eight to eighteen over the course of the book. Basically, this is a coming of age story from hell.

The first thirty pages of the book are some of the most difficult. In that short span of pages, Jos’s home trading ship is attacked, his parents killed, and Jos himself kidnapped by an abusive pirate captain. This section of the book (and this section only) was told in second person, which was a brilliant decision on the part of Lowachee. A lot of what of what happens to Jos is implied, not out right stated, but the effects ripple through the rest of the book.

When Jos finally manages to get away, it is because he is kidnapped yet again, this time by an alien sympathizer. He winds up on the alien planet and is trained as warrior in the fight against humanity. It would have been really easy for Warchild to fall into the trap of being either a story about humankind valiantly fighting the evil aliens or the noble aliens resisting persecution by the humans (i.e. Cameron’s Avatar). Instead, it’s never really clear who Jos can trust. The only person that Jos does trust in the book is his mentor, but I was never fully convinced that he wasn’t using Jos as a tool in the war.

Like I said earlier, this book isn’t really about the war. It’s about the impact the war has on Jos. For much of the story Jos is adrift, lost in depths of space, not truly belonging to one world or another. He’s traumatized and isolated and has a whole host of issues.

Warchild was deeply uncomfortable to read, which I think was the whole point. It’s also a deeply powerful book. If it has one weakness, it’s that the alien culture could have been more original – they felt heavily Japanese inspired. I would recommend Warchild but with caution. I think you need to know going in that this is a book largely about child abuse. I’ve seen it be compared to Ender’s Game, but it’s definitely not a book I’d give to a younger reader.

Review originally posted on The Illustrated Page. ( )
2 rösta pwaites | Mar 16, 2016 |
After pirates kill his family and kidnap him, young Jos is completely alone. He escapes to an alien planet, but even there he can’t escape war. He is trained to be an assassin and a spy, and then set loose upon his own people. Jos was clearly abused, and he finds it hard to trust or be physically close to people; after a few hundred pages of hearing how traumatized he still is, however, I found myself more frustrated than sympathetic. ( )
  wealhtheowwylfing | Feb 29, 2016 |
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Karin Lowachee's debut novel is the engrossing story of a young boy's coming of age amid interstellar war, a riveting saga in the tradition of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. The merchant ship Mukudori encompasses the whole of eight-year-old Jos's world, until a notorious pirate destroys the ship, slaughters the adults, and enslaves the children. Thus begins a desperate odyssey of terror and escape that takes Jos beyond known space to the home of the strits, Earth's alien enemies. To survive, the boy must become a living weapon and a master spy. But no training will protect Jos in a war where every hope might be a deadly lie, and every friendship might hide a lethal betrayal. And all the while he will face the most grueling trial of his life... becoming his own man.

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