Review: Grass
I picked this up because John Scalzi mentioned that Sherri Tepper does some great world-building in Grass. I like Scalzi’s writing, so I gave this a look. I agree with Scalzi that the world she creates and how she introduces readers work brilliantly. The characters in that world and how it drives them to grow make it a great book all around.
The world of Grass is an extrapolation of ours that heightens the aspects that Tepper wants to talk about and elides the ones she doesn’t. One of the ways that works is that she makes the parts she wants to talk about so intriguing that the reader forgets about what’s missing. Religion is there in a big way, and I found that picking at how much of it she is extrapolating it from Mormonism, Catholicism, or something caught my attention. And then sects within the church pop up with the inherent intrigue and I’m thinking about how all that meshes. None of which is really the aspect of the religion that she wants to focus on, bit its all engaging until she does get to her point.
Tepper brings us into the world through several characters’ views of it in ways that both show the reader the world and the characters. Good writers who are writing from the third person across their cast are usually aiming to do that, but I think Tepper is really doing it well. There’s a double shell game going on here where each the events each character is telling the reader what they know about the world and how they think and feel about those things. And she is author is deftly choosing the events that tell us about the characters and how they are changing. Or are not changing.
Tepper writes a book that makes this all happen for a reader. I think it’s built to be magical, even though it wasn’t magical for me. It’s not one of my favorite books, but I can tell it’s someone’s favorite. It’s worth a look to see if it’s one of yours.
Strongly recommended.