Tankborn: 11/03/13

Tankborn by Karen Sandler uses the Indian caste system and some modified sanskrit terms as world building tools. In this planet-wide India, named Loka, Kayla and Mishalla, long time best friends, and GENs (Genetically Engineered Non-Humans) are separated for their assignments.

I read the book on the promise of a thought-provoking plot and an ethnically diverse cast of characters. While the diversity is there, the forty of so pages I got through didn't show the nuances of life in a remote land (or this case, planet), nor a credible sense of how the Loka caste system worked — beyond being a simplified version of the Indian system.

Kayla suffers from a similar attention spam problem as Braden in Demon Eyes, expect she seems to have a more extreme case of it. In the pages I read, she bounced around from feeling a terrible loss at her separation, to anger at the caste system, to hormones over the great grandson of her new master to mundanely complaining about her cramps. When the cramps were given as much page space as more serious items, I closed the book.

In those few pages, I really got no sense of Kayla as a person or the world in which she lives beyond it being "India on a far away planet." Planets are HUGE and India, while large and diverse, is still small compared to the Earth.

One star

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