Watcher’s Web, by Patty Jansen

The book gets off to a very confusing start, with no backstory, no explanation of who the major character is (or any of the others, for that matter).

This continues for quite some time, until finally (well over half-way through the book), one of the other characters (who has been around from the very beginning) reveals some information about who and where they both are.

I'm now in chapter 25 of 30, and I still don't feel any sense of purpose to the story. The main character has found out what her real name is (she's adopted) and where she came from (although we never find out how she got from there to her adoptive parents, and believe me, it's not a simple journey…), but there remain so many confusing elements to the story, such as where she and the second-major character are trying to get to, and what their purpose in getting there is, as well as what motives other characters who seem to have an interest in her have, that I'm totally anticipating getting to the end of the book and simply finding out "oh, that was a period of time in someone's life", with no particular feeling of achievement or explanation in the story.

At the end of chapter 30 (ie: the end of the book), I find that that was a pretty accurate expectation. The main character experiences a totally uncharacteristically romantic ending (I almost used the word "conclusion", but it isn't) to the story, and still hasn't closed off any of the open questions or achieved anything of note other than becoming pregnant at the age of 17. We can only even be slightly sure about which of two potential fathers that was with, too.

Summary:

Rather too much nudity, and especially mention of buttocks, for my liking (especially in what purports to be a science fiction story but is in fact more mediaeval in many of its characters and events). Nothing that I would call a "story", with a beginning, a middle and an end. This book is more like all middle.

In my world of literature, a story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The beginning is something which tells us who we're reading about, or where they are, or what they're trying to do, or why they're doing it, and maybe some combination of several of those. This book has none of that.

The middle is the interesting part where we find out whether they succeed, and what gets in their way along the journey between beginning and end, but without a beginning, the middle is just a confused jumble of things that happen, for no apparent reason and without giving us any insight into whether they're good things or bad things.

The end is where all (or most of) the bits in the middle come together, and we find out what happened, and whether it's what was supposed to happen, or at least what some of the characters wanted to happen. This book doesn't have that part, either.

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