The Temple at Landfall

Jane Fletcher

Completed 5/16/2020, Reviewed 5/16/2020

4 stars

This book was a real surprise.  It starts out as a slow, mediocre fantasy and quickly turns into a fast-paced, action-packed, lesbian science fantasy dystopia.  Yeah.  I found it gripping and very well written.  It’s about a planet of all women who have developed psychic gene splicing by special gifted women called imprinters.  They also do psychic cloning of animals and psychic healing.  A strange religion has grown up around the imprinters, a sisterhood, which was reminiscent of my Catholic school experience with a few evil nuns.  There are battles with snow lions, conflict between factions of soldiers, and cynical heretics to add adventure, excitement, and humor to the book.  You just have to get past the first twenty or thirty pages for it to get exciting.  This book was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in 2006.  It’s part of a series of five books and there are several ways you can order your reading of the books.  This one is the first published. 

 

Lynn is an imprinter.  She is one of the most gifted imprinters the local temple has ever had, splicing the genes of women couples who want to bear children, performing more efficiently than any other imprinter.  She makes a lot of money for the temple.  And she is celibate, as dictated by the holy books governing the role and behavior of imprinters.  She hates the isolation of being an imprinter and longs for her distant past where she grew up in the mountains without restrictions.  Soon, a small contingent of sisters from the Temple at Landfall, the central and largest temple in the country, come to take her away, citing as motivation the Goddess’ will.  On the way to Landfall, the carriage is attacked by snow lions.  Most of the temple guards are killed, but Lynn is rescued by the rangers who accompanied them over the dangerous pass.  Lynn falls in love with one of the rangers, and is caught kissing her, causing a fury among the sisters and guards back at Landfall.  Kim, the ranger, is stripped of rank and punished.  Lynn gets a new over-pious, arrogant, and just plain mean mentor.  But she longs for an escape from her fate and for the love of Kim.  Lots more ensues, but that gives away too many of the exiting details.

Lynn and Kim are the main characters.  Lynn is young and naïve, sadly given to her fate of life-long celibacy.  She’s a good character, but Kim really steels the show.  She is much more earthy and has a lot more character development.  Her adventures are wide and varied, she and grows from being a typical promiscuous ranger to longing for the single true love of Lynn.  Some of the evil characters are typically one-dimensional, like the two mentors Lynn has, but they are deliciously evil at that.  You just hate them in their sanctimonious smugness.  And the evil major of the Guards of the Sisterhood is also wonderfully hateful and single-purposed.  One character I really liked was Gail, the head of the heretics.  She adds a lot of wry humor to the story.  

The heresy is a wonderful story in itself, bringing doubt on the whole social structure that has developed in this society.  It’s part of what makes this story more science fiction than fantasy.  At the end of the book, there’s an appendix that’s the diary of one of the first elders that’s a revelation.  Although the trope of this heresy has been done before, I found it exciting nonetheless, mostly because it’s framed as a heresy, rather than a simple discovery of the ancient past. 

I give the book four out of five stars.  It was a delight to read, with beautiful prose which did not distract from the plot or the action.  I might eventually read the others, after I get through my huge TBR pile.