Review: Reap the Wild Wind, by Julie E. Czerneda

[Russ Allbery]

Reap the Wild Wind
by Julie E. Czerneda

Series:    Stratification #1
Publisher: DAW
Copyright: 2007
Printing:  September 2008
ISBN:      0-7564-0487-8
Format:    Mass market
Pages:     459

Reap the Wild Wind is the first book in the Stratification series. This
is set in the same universe as the Trade Pact series (which starts with
A Thousand Words for Stranger), but goes back in time, telling the
story of the Om'ray before they left Cersi to become the Clan. You may
have more interest in this series if you read and enjoyed the Trade
Pact trilogy, but it's not a prerequisite. It's been over ten years
since I read that series, I've forgotten nearly everything about it
except the weird gender roles, and I didn't have any trouble following
the story.

Aryl Sarc is member of the Yena Clan, who live a precarious existence
in the trees above a vast swamp filled with swarms of carnivorous
creatures. They are one of several isolated clans of Om'ray on the
planet Cersi. Everything about the clans is tightly constrained by an
agreement between the Om'ray, the Tiktik, and the Oud to maintain a
wary peace. The agreement calls for nothing about the nature of the
world or its three species to ever change.

Reap the Wild Wind opens with the annual dresel harvest: every fall, a
great, dry wind called the M'hir flows down the mountains and across
the forest in which the Yena live, blowing free the ripe dresel for
collection at the treetops. Dresel is so deeply a part of Aryl's world
that the book never explains it, but the reader can intuit that it
contains some essential nutrient without which all the Yena would die.
But disaster strikes while Aryl is watching the dresel harvest,
disaster in the form of a strange flying vehicle no one has seen before
and an explosion that kills many of the Yena and ruins the harvest
essential to life.

The early part of the book is the emotional and political fallout of
this disaster. Aryl discovers an unknown new talent, saving the man
she's in love with (although they're too young to psychically join in
the way of the Om'ray) at the cost of her brother. There's a lot of
angst, a lot of cliched descriptions of internal psychic chaos (the
M'hir that will be familiar to readers of the Trade Pact books), and a
lot of her mother being nasty and abusive in ways that Aryl doesn't
recognize as abuse. I struggled to get into the story; Aryl was an
aimless mess, and none of the other characters were appealing. The
saving grace for me in the early going were the interludes with Enris,
an Om'ray from a far different clan, a metalworker whose primary
dealings are with the Oud instead of the Tiktik.

This stage of the story thankfully doesn't last. Aryl eventually ends
up among the Tiktik, struggling to understand their far different
perspective on the world, and then meets the visitors who caused the
disaster. They're not only from outside of Aryl's limited experience;
they shouldn't even exist by the rules of Aryl's world. As Aryl slowly
tries to understand what they're doing, the scope of the story expands,
with hints that Aryl's world is far more complicated than she realized.

Czerneda sticks with a tight viewpoint focus on Aryl and Enris. That's
frustrating when Aryl is uninterested in, or cannot understand, key
pieces of the larger picture that the reader wants to know. But it
creates a sense of slow discovery from an alien viewpoint that
occasionally reminded me of Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman series.
Steerswoman is much better, but it's much better than almost
everything, and Aryl's growing understanding of her world is still fun.
I particularly liked how Aryl's psychic species defines the world by
the sensed locations of the Om'ray clans, making it extremely hard for
her to understand geography in the traditional sense.

I was also happy to see Czerneda undermine the strict sexual dimorphism
of Clan society a tiny bit with an Om'ray who doesn't want to
participate in the pair-bonding of Choosing. She painted herself into a
corner with the extreme gender roles in the Trade Pact series and
there's still a lot of that here, but at least a few questions raised
about that structure.

Reap the Wild Wind is all setup with little payoff. By the end of the
book, we still just have hints of the history of Cersi, the goals of
the Oud or Tiktik, or the true shape of what the visitors are
investigating. But it had grabbed my interest, mostly because of Aryl's
consistent, thoughtful curiosity. I wish this first book had gotten
into the interesting meat of the story faster and had gotten farther,
but this is good enough that I'll probably keep reading.

Followed by Riders of the Storm.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-01-29

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>