People of the Fire

People of the Wolf is a masterpiece; People of the Sea is great: People of the Moon still haunts me. The Gears are great writers and this disappointing book won't change that.

People of the Fire follows the carrier of the Wolf bundle, the remains of Wolf Dreamer's companion from the old world. The inhabitants of the new world are facing a drought and the extinction of their large prey. A rivalry develops between two dreamers over the Wolf bundle, the efforts of Wolf Dreamer and the bundle itself.

Although this book has a heart-rending sequence that had me saying “no no no!” it rapidly devolved and dragged on to the point where I just wanted to finish it but didn't really want to pick it up. The writing is not up to the standard of the Gears' other work: the characters are shallow, events are poorly set up, and the point of view is all mixed up. The POV keeps coming in to characters who are mere observers. In the last third of the book, a character takes a major role that is never fully justified. Although they were clearly trying to do something related to gender, it feels like they were just being trendy here (for the early nineties). There are a couple characters who are gender-atypical, but they don't really show it, they just talk about it. I won't be keeping this one.