Rating: 
Summary: Unsatisfying, by-the-numbers retread
Review: When I was 18 I adored the Darkover series, so I opened this novel hoping to recapture some of that spirit. But I can't ever be 18 again, and I can't ignore all the problems that made this book deeply unsatisfying. The basic plot, for one, was already done (twice!) much better in The Bloody Sun. The characters are all fairly flat, with a couple of identifying quirks substituting for characterization, and none of them have much motivation to speak of -- instead of complexity, we have simplistic stimulus-and-response behavior that just doesn't ring true. Even in the case of Margaret, our Heroine, there's not much depth, and very little emotion: we're told that she's feeling this way and that, and she thinks about her feelings constantly, but we're never allowed to participate in those feelings. The transformation of the bitter hard-drinking Lew of her memories (which I found quite a plausible and interesting development of the character) back into Good Old Darkover Lew, everybody's pal and passionate good-guy, as soon as he reappeared was sudden, unmotivated, and made me wonder, if all he needed to make himself a happy, well-balanced man again was to come back to Darkover, and nobody minded his coming back, why didn't he do it years ago and spare everybody more trouble? Plus, the confrontation with the Big Secret Villain, which should have been the climax of the novel, occurs about halfway through, leaving the rest of it anticlimactic, aimless, and rather pointless. (Lots more whining and histrionics all around, though and some seriously bizarre family dynamics.) I will only mention in passing the clumsy prose, and the extreme padding that turn a sparsely-plotted book into a heavyweight for no particular reason. It would be easy to attribute this book's faults to its not having been actually written by MZB. But MZB turned out her share of serious clunkers over the years, and I've never read any of Adrienne Martine-Barnes's solo efforts. so that wouldn't be entirely fair. Exile's Song does hit most of the expected notes in a Darkover book, it just hits them dully, without any real originality or freshness or invention. It's a connect-the-dots, color-inside-the-lines version, flat and predictable. There are books in the Darkover series that do have freshness, originality, and real strength of feeling. (The Heritage of Hastur, say, or The Forbidden Tower, or The Bloody Sun.) I'd head there for my fix, not to Exile's Song.
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