Rating: 
Summary: Not Tepper's best, but still worth reading
Review: Sheri Tepper's latest is a remarkably ambitious and complex story, perhaps too ambitious and complex. The story encompasses so many different locations, and different species, all with competing agendas, it was difficult to keep track of who was doing what to whom, and for what purpose. I had a little trouble remembering who some of the individual players were, and their various foibles and attributes.
I appreciated being introduced to each set of players one at a time. The back story was quite useful, and once we got to the action set on Moss, the plot moved along briskly. And along the way, Tepper paid homage to her customary icons: environmental responsibility, religious (in)tolerance, human rights, the interconnectedness of us all. However, the conclusion felt rushed, almost as if Tepper hurried her characters along to meet the publisher's deadline rather than their own destinies.
Still, it's an enjoyable read, full of lovely moments and beautiful sentences. The poem which opens the book ("The Litany Of Animals") is fun and melancholy at the same time. I wish Tepper had given us more of Jewel's mother's epic poem than the few bits and pieces sprinkled here and there throughout the text.
I remain one of Tepper's most fervent admirers. This is nice work, worth reading. It's just not her best.
Rating: 
Summary: Tepper's Usually Fascinating Concepts, but Unusually Uneven
Review: The Companions begins with a lyrical description of the planet Moss, echoing the opening of Grass, my favorite of Tepper's books. Then it moves to a horrible description of a future Earth's towers, echoing the future Earth in Beauty, my second favorite. Sheri Tepper's usual graceful writing is here, along with her fascinating worlds, cultural observations, and environmental/feminist/socialist themes (being a feminist/environmentalist/semi-socialist myself, I like to see such good apology). I loved the whole concept of the Scent Mistress. And I loved all the dogs, who exhibit such impeccably doglike behavior. Unfortunately, while Tepper usually weaves her plots smoothly, The Companions has a more lumpy fabric. At times she seemed to contradict herself, and combining first-person narration with jumping around in time and place made for a confusing story. Also, one of my pet peeves: if you are going to use a naive narrator, don't let them get ahead of their story (for the ideal example of a naive narrator, read Huck Finn). Jewel keeps adding comments along the lines of "I would later learn how wrong we were." Here in Amazon reviews, I once read a wonderful comparison of Sheri Tepper to the painter Bev Doolittle. Along the lines of this metaphor, Jewel seems to be pointing out the hidden animals rather than letting us discover them for ourselves as the plotlines skein together.
Rating: 
Summary: Thought-provoking and beautifully written
Review: THE COMPANIONS was my first introduction to Tepper's writing - and wow, what a fantastic way to start! Sheri S. Tepper has written a gripping, powerful novel about our future. It deals with such themes as overpopulation, animal rights, and communication with other cultures. It also raises important questions about religious beliefs, such as: if man was created in God's image, aren't we superior to every other lifeform? And if so, don't we have the right to take the lives of those lesser lifeforms? Not a quick read by any means, this is one novel you'll want to take your time reading and savoring, and it's likely to stick with you for weeks afterward. The book is written in the first person point of view, which gives the reader a great deal of insight into the state of the Universe in the year 2712. Jewel Delis, the novel's heroine, is an arkist - a person who strives to preserve what little animal life is left on Earth. Encountering an immense amount of opposition, Jewel is forced to take the dogs she'd been working with for years away from Earth, or they would certainly be destroyed. The planet Moss seems to provide just the right place for a brief relocation until a more permanent solution can be found. But the planet itself has secrets. What are the colorful flame-like beings that dance in the clearings at night? What happened to almost 80 people who went for walks in the moss and never returned? And what are the bright flashes of light that make people disappear? An intriguing and thought provoking read, THE COMPANIONS is a wonderful example of a clever, richly developed science-fiction novel.
Rating:
Summary: Satire or serious?
Review: This book had a promising premise. That Earth suffers from overpopulation due to retirees returning from off-world colonies, basically the planet Earth becomes the state of Florida. That due to population pressure, religious extremists create a movement to ban all animals from Earth because only man is created in God's image. A group of animal lovers run an underground railroad for pets.
Throw into the mix a strange planet where the whole planet is intelligent. (The tired Gaia theme.) The means of communication is? Smells.
All this is great. But unfortunately, the story decends into absurdity. Throw in an ancient alien race of environmentalists and another nearly extinct race of super-shapeshifting aliens bent on destruction (and responsible for the creation of humanity), who take the form of dogs - they actually think that dogs enslaved humans rather than humans domesticating dogs - and you get a complex mess of polemics. Is it intended as satire? Or is it bad writing? It is hard to tell. Without giving the ending away, Tepper relies on a deus ex machina to extricate the heroine from the crisis at the end of the book.
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