Cloud's Rider

Rating:
Summary: Spooky Sci-fi-western
Review: After I had read Rider at the Gate I noticed a few things in the story that didn't add up. Like how come Danny thought that Spook wouldn't become a rogue. These questions were more than adequately answered in the sequel, Cloud's Rider. Cloud's Rider is even more terrifying than Rider at the Gate and the level of tension in the conversations, spoken or unspoken, really drives the novel forward.The description of the weather is so real that I could feel the snow around my face and my legs getting tired from walking in the snow. I eagerly anticipate the next novel in the series!

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful sequel. Please write another
Review: An amazingly intriguing origignal story. No one but Ms. Cherry could have dreamed up such an original world. Once again an exploration into lonliness, and into unconditional loyalty. Only bad thing about this series is the abrupt end.

Rating:
Summary: OK, but didn't live up to its potential
Review: Cherryh is one of the best writers in the genre. Her worst work usually beats the best work of lots of other SF writers. I wasn't thrilled with this book, but that doesn't mean it's unreadable. It just isn't the best thing she's ever done. First, the good parts. The nighthorses are wonderful. Psychic steeds have already been done to excess by other writers. I usually find them pretty bland and saccharine. Cherryh, however, does a great job of endowing her beasts with believable animal personalities. They get jealous of other nighthorses. They throw tantrums. They mooch treats. They do the sorts of things that real critters do. The male characters are pretty well developed as well. Some are noble; some are creeps. All have normal human flaws, and they act like I'd expect people in their circumstances to behave. The female characters, unfortunately, are much more two-dimensional. I didn't really get a feeling for what makes them tick. The problem with "Cloud's Rider" is that the plot and the character development don't go together. The setup for the story is that an adolescent girl hooks up with a crazy nighthorse, causing all sorts of trouble. The story ends when the girl's attraction to the nighthorse is resolved. Alas, you don't really care what happens to the girl. Cherryh spends too little effort exploring her motivations. The girl doesn't have real presence in the story. Ending the story when her troubles are dealt with just doesn't work. The interesting characters still have growing to do, and you don't get to see it happen.

Rating:
Summary: Master of Suspense
Review: Cherryh quickly sweeps us into the suspense of madness on an alien world and its threat to the fragility of a human foothold there. Leaving so many threads unwoven at the end, this is the stuff of nightmares. Beware bonding with the lovable characters that grace these pages, because this is the first time Cherryh cannot save them all...

Rating:
Summary: Action with a telepathic dimension
Review: Cherryh's "Cloud's Rider" continues the saga (after "Rider at the Gate") of Danny Fisher and the telepathic nighthorse, Cloud, with a desperate mountain climb through a horrific blizzard that would be plenty suspenseful all on its own. Add a crazed telepathic pursuer and a comatose girl whose thoughts can kill and you've got edge-of-your-seat, sci-fi adventure
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The climbing party consists of two boys and their comatose sister, the sole survivors of a village wiped out in a vermin swarm, triggered by a rogue horse. They are being led by neophyte rider Danny and his horse, whose ability to visualize the terrain in all their heads keeps them alive.

Riders and horses have a strong bond, a symbiotic relationship for which the horse will lay down its life. They guard trading convoys and villages from the local telepathic predators and are regarded with suspicion by non-riders who live in close-knit religious communities and distrust the riders' freedom.

Guiltily, Danny has a secret, which he does not share with the riders of the village where his party finds its winter refuge, thereby endangering them all. The reader's information also trickles in, sustaining the mystery just long enough to get back to the action.

Well-paced and well-plotted, "Cloud's Rider" offers plenty of adventure in a well-developed world.

Rating:
Summary: Action with a telepathic dimension
Review: Cherryh's "Cloud's Rider" continues the saga (after "Rider at the Gate") of Danny Fisher and the telepathic nighthorse, Cloud, with a desperate mountain climb through a horrific blizzard that would be plenty suspenseful all on its own. Add a crazed telepathic pursuer and a comatose girl whose thoughts can kill and you've got edge-of-your-seat, sci-fi adventure
.
The climbing party consists of two boys and their comatose sister, the sole survivors of a village wiped out in a vermin swarm, triggered by a rogue horse. They are being led by neophyte rider Danny and his horse, whose ability to visualize the terrain in all their heads keeps them alive.

Riders and horses have a strong bond, a symbiotic relationship for which the horse will lay down its life. They guard trading convoys and villages from the local telepathic predators and are regarded with suspicion by non-riders who live in close-knit religious communities and distrust the riders' freedom.

Guiltily, Danny has a secret, which he does not share with the riders of the village where his party finds its winter refuge, thereby endangering them all. The reader's information also trickles in, sustaining the mystery just long enough to get back to the action.

Well-paced and well-plotted, "Cloud's Rider" offers plenty of adventure in a well-developed world.

Rating:
Summary: More Horse-Opera than Space-Opera
Review: Humans have become stranded on a planet where the wildlife through telepathic projection stalk and confuse their prey into thinking they are safe, when in fact they are in danger of being attacked and devoured. Only the night-horses that are compatible with a chosen human companion can prevent this. The night-horse's telepathic - sending - abilities offering protection.

There is a real sense of the wild-west frontier in this book. Danny fisher's parents scraping by on mechanical, and furniture restoration work, behind the safety of the town's walls. Greed, jealousy, and lots of other grubby things.

Cloud's Rider along with its stablemate and precursor - Rider at the Gate, don't cover a lot of ground as far as plot is cocerned, both depending on a huge amount of fine detail, mostly to do with survival in the harsh and deadly environment. And this is the main weakness of the books. Yes, the whole story works as well as any of Ms Cherryh's other works, but I feel it would have been more agreeable had Rider at the Gate and Cloud's Rider been trimmed to about two thirds of current length, by condensing the rather long descriptive passages, brilliantly written though they are. Even so, for sheer overall effectivenes I would recommend that these books be read and in the correct order, since they are directly head-to-head with respect to each other. Rider at the Gate and then Cloud's Rider.

Rating:
Summary: Unique and fresh series
Review: I have read RIDER AT THE GATE and CLOUD'S RIDER, I find the story enthralling, the characters are real, the relationship between the riders and their horses along with the enviroment is like a breath of fresh air, I am looking forward to another book in this series.

Rating:
Summary: Ignore the critics
Review: I like this book as much as the first. In spite of the bad reviews it was given I ordered it and was glad I did. I am ready for the next!

Rating:
Summary: Master of Suspense
Review: I realize now that this is the sequel to a previous work but confusion about previous events wasn't a problem for me. I enjoy novels which have a different premise than the usual 'Farmboy realizes he has to save the world from the evil Foozle', and this certainly is quite unique, and quite interesting. The interaction between horse and rider was both intriguing and distracting. The jumping between what horse and rider feel in certain scenes was difficult to follow. The climbing the mountain trail scene left me as mentally tired as the characters were because of the jumps in perspective, the length of the scene and the disjointed writing style that I had been warned about. Maybe some people can handle the combination of long, densely written run on sentences mixed in with sentence fragments. I found it distracted from the story, especially because I'd have to reread parts to understand exactly what was being said.

It truly is disappointing to me that I wasn't able to enjoy this book because unique and fresh concepts in the fields of fantasy and science fiction are hard to come by. If she were paired with a writer with a consistent, clear style I'd snap up the book in a heartbeat but as it is, I can't recommend this novel. The only thing that saves it from getting only 1 star is the uniqueness.