Rating: 
Summary: Unhurried tale about the freedom and peace of solitude.
Review: This unhurried tale about the freedom and peace of solitude and success in later life is presented as science fiction, but I believe people at any stage of life can relate. Ofelia is an old woman who decides to stay behind on a colony planet she has called home for half her life when the sponsoring company decides to move the colonists to another world. She is ready for a few years of freedom at the end of her long life. The freedom to wear what she wants, eat what she wants, rise and rest when she wants. She spends a few seasons and about a hundred pages alone. Then she encounters native intelligent life i.e. aliens and Ofelia gets acquainted with them and watches them learn at a marvelous rate that belies her initial impression of their childlike intelligence. Off world powers become aware of the intelligent life and send a group of specialists to study them. This book was slow moving, but the writing was lovely. For some reason, I really like descriptions of weather and gardening and Moon provides plenty of both along with rather simple arts and crafts of bead painting and clothes making that I rather enjoyed. The story of rising to success and finding oneself highly valued, respected and useful is not new. But I have never read a book where the main character is old and Ofelia offered a refreshing perspective. I enjoyed this book. Recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: A thought-provoking delight!
Review: When her husband Humberto died, Ofelia became her son's dependent in the eyes of Sims Bancorp. Forty years after she helped to found Colony 3245.12, all of her children but Barto are dead along with their father; and Ofelia tolerates her domineering daughter-in-law Rosara as best she can. When Sims Bancorp sends a ship to withdraw the colonists, after deciding to abandon its unprofitable colony and cede its license to the world that Ofelia now considers her home, the company demands extra payment for relocating the useless old woman who will probably die in cryosleep, anyway. Luckily for Ofelia, though, she's scheduled for a later shuttle than Barto and Rosara. When she slips away from the village to hide in the nearby, still untouched alien forest, the only two people who would protest her absence are already in the cryotanks. Soon the ship is gone, leaving Ofelia alone. And that's just fine with her.
The old woman revels in her solitude, because this is the first time in her long life that she's been free from the demands and restrictions placed on her by others. She tends her garden, competently maintains the village's power plant, and laughs when she throws her last pair of detested shoes into the recycler. Then another company's ship enters orbit, and starts to insert a colony at a location thousands of miles from Ofelia's village. At which time she, and the newly arrived colonists, find out that this world has indigenous intelligent life after all.
The friend who recommended this book to me was right. Ofelia, a person who had little worth to start with in her society's eyes - a housewife and mother, educated no more than necessary to perform her expected tasks - has no value at all now, in age and physical infirmity. But what she does have, a naturally intelligent old woman's experience and wisdom and insight, turn out to be exactly what the unexpected and dangerous first contact situation on her adopted world requires. Grumpy and no longer willing to suffer fools gladly - still savoring life, but no longer reluctant to risk leaving it behind if that's the price of being free at last to make her own choices - Ofelia is at once a fully realized individual, and a worthy representative of all the other wise and salty old women whose value too few Human societies appreciate. Or even comprehend.
A thought-provoking delight!
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