Reviews for Restoree

The average rating for Restoree based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-06-21 00:00:00 Richard Peralta A soft 3 stars for this one. I bought this 1967 space opera romance - Anne McCaffrey's first published novel! - as a paperback, back in the day when I was a huge fan. (Not so much now, sorry, Anne.) It might even still be hidden somewhere on my overstuffed basement bookshelves. In Restoree, Sara, an unattractive, virginal Earth woman, the typical lonely librarian, is kidnapped by aliens. What happens next is mostly gone from her memory, but when she fully comes to she finds that she's a caretaker for a man in a mental institution. (Oh and also: she has a new, more attractive face and body. Yay!) Sara is suspicious of the whole set-up, so she continues to act witless (as the guys in charge expect from her, because of Reasons). Eventually she figures out that her patient, Harlan, is Somebody Important, and that the guys in charge of the institution are drugging him into a stupor. So Sara sneakily starts feeding Harlan her own, undrugged food. When Harlan shakes off the drugs after a few days, they escape. There's political and military conflict, mixed with a love story, and several people in Harlan's world are suspicious that Sara is a restoree - a person captured by the Mil spaceships who was physically stripped of her skin, which invariably causes the restoree to go insane. And there Sara is, in her nice new golden skin. But not crazy. Hmm. Lots of old-fashioned romance tropes here, surrounded by a plot that has occasional memorable bits encased in a lot of utterly forgettable space opera-y stuff and hand-wavy science. Go read Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga books instead if you're interested in this kind of book.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-08-15 00:00:00 James Farrell I read this mostly as a historical analysis of science-fiction as it was the first book published by Anne McCaffrey in 1967. (She has said that she wrote it in response to the misogynistic tropes of 1960s science-fiction where women were helpless addendums to the male-driven plot.) Reading it almost 50 years later), the actions of the female protagonist are still completely dictated by the alien men in the story. Yes, the protagonist is head-strong and capable (she can sail a ship and saves the life of one man".) However, the alien society is entirely male dominated and women are "claimed" by men with little female self-will being evident. Women are expected to bear children and men are ridiculed for being virgins (seems pretty close to a 1960s mentality.) So while the female protagonist has a personality, she still faints at various times and isn't free within this half feudal/half technological society. It was a disappointment - the dialogue was weak and unbelievable and the main plot lacked suspense or interest. Anne McCaffrey was later able to fashion more nuanced and believable female characters in less ridiculously derivative settings in her later Pern novels. I would skip this book unless you want to see how even when an author attempts to write a new novel with female achievement in a different society, she still cannot break free of the gender biases and prejudices of her own time.