Review: The Voice In All

The Voice In All by Audrey Auden
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Although this was well done in general, a few factors kept it out of the Platinum tier of my Best of the Year list, which it otherwise nearly deserved.

Firstly, the genres. There are too many of them. It's mainly fantasy, and YA, but it's also post-apocalyptic and dystopian. Those last two are genres I usually avoid, but the premise seemed fresh enough that I gave it a go anyway, and was glad I did. The degree to which it's dystopian also comes into question in the course of the story, but I'd argue that a society that denies a whole demographic access to the arts and sciences is at least somewhat dystopian, regardless of how nice and well-intentioned the people who run it may be (and are we sure they actually are?).

Four genres would have been OK, but by the end it also seems to be cosmic, and maybe cyberpunk, and at that point it started to break down a bit for me. By the end of the book, we've had a lot more questions than answers. It doesn't end on a cliffhanger, as such, but it does go from a relatively straightforward fantasy post-apocalyptic YA dystopia to something a lot more complicated that I, for one, struggle to define, and while that may set up the series to be more than it would otherwise have been (if the author can pull it off), for this specific book I felt that less would have been more.

Something else that broke down a little for me was an element of the worldbuilding. In the society depicted, women (through, essentially, magical drugs) are more or less immortal, or at least unaging and very long-lived, but men live normal lifespans. The women engage in arts and sciences and run the society, while the men do the farming, hunting, gathering, essential crafts like smithing, and suchlike. Only a few women give birth to children, and there seem to be as many girls as boys.

This means that for the tech level depicted, the pyramid is the wrong way up. Our society is able to have fewer than half of its members involved in producing food, because of multiple technological breakthroughs, but the tipping point of fewer than half of, say, US adults being involved in agriculture came not much more than a hundred years ago. Unless there's tech we never saw in the book, the economics make no sense. That's a minor point, because it's background, rather than foreground, but it did bother me.

(Since I posted this review, the author has graciously responded to say that is very much something that's on her mind, and there is an explanation to come; she's also incorporated a few elements of that explanation into this book (involving the women growing some of the food), in response to my critique - which I guess makes me a quantum reviewer, affecting things by observing them. I'll leave the critique in place, because the changes - which I've seen - don't fully answer my issues, and I did have questions on first read, but please note that this isn't a result of the author's ignorance about how food works; it's just not her focus in this book.)

On the upside, even in the pre-release copy I received via Netgalley for review, the copy editing has few flaws, apart from the way the author punctuates when interrupting dialog with a tag. (You don't start the second part of a sentence with a capital if it's the same sentence, and if it's a different sentence, you don't follow the tag with a comma.)

The story itself, and the characters, engaged me, despite the usual YA thing of:
Adult: Don't do this thing! Bad consequences will inevitably ensue.
Young person: I accept that completely and it makes total sense.
[Young person then proceeds to do the thing, because it seems like a good idea at the time. Bad consequences mostly fail to ensue.]

I'm giving it a lot of critique, but that's partly because it engaged me enough to think deeply about it. It invited thought; it wasn't just made from box mix, it had some originality to it, and it was well executed and had the odd moment here and there of reflection that made a point with some depth. The flaws, while they did combine to lose it a fifth star, were individually minor enough that they left me still enjoying it, and overall I recommend it and look forward to reading a sequel.

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