I discovered Sheri S. Tepper as an author when I was in middle school. My mom had taken me to the Downtown Portland Public Library and in the Young Adult section I found the book Jinian Star-Eye sitting on the display racks. The cover intrigued me, and the Title and short synopsis cinched it and I took the book home. I tore through it like crazy and completely fell in love with the character of Jinian as well as the world in which she lived. I ended up checking out the book several more times during the years in Middle and High School. Honestly I can’t even remember how many times I read the book before I discovered that it was really book 9 of a 9 book series.
So begin my love affair with all of Sheri S. Tepper’s Sci-Fi/Fantasy books. I have virtually all of them, though some of her first works are harder to come by these days. Due to my school schedule over the last couple years, as well as the rest of life, I have fallen behind on reading her latest works though I am starting to get caught up. Right now I am reading The Fresco, which is proving to be yet another excellent book. While I love her style of writing and how she tracks the story from several different angles by jumping between characters from chapter to chapter eventually bringing them together as the story unfolds, I also love her underlying themes. Her themes resonate strongly with me especially those about how we treat each other, what it means to be a creature that is truly part of our world, and even what it means to be human as well as how we treat the planet we call home. I find that her works really cause me to rethink how we as humans are managing, or not, ourselves and what could be done to fix many of the social ills we suffer from.
