CASSIOPEIA'S QUEST - REVELATION

A collection of 10 stories of women of various historical periods.

In the opening tale, “Savanna,” a female hunter goes after a beast on the African savanna in 100,000 B.C.E. In “Commerce,” another young woman in Egypt in 3000 B.C.E. is appointed by her father to complete a trade deal and must contend with crocodiles and terrible weather on her journey up the Nile. “Empire,” set in 330–329 B.C.E., features a woman introducing steel weapons to Alexander the Great, while “Faith” follows two Jewish sisters in Jerusalem in 20 C.E., who want Jesus Christ to come to their Passover seder. As the chronology advances, stories involve women’s encounters with the bubonic plague, Leonardo da Vinci, and renowned scientist Michael Faraday. A young woman works on the Manhattan Project in “Now I Am Become Death,” and in “Chaos,” an emergency room doctor goes to Vietnam as an Army nurse. Finally, in “Tree of Life,” a crew of women who run a crab boat modern-day Alaska fret about increasing tension between the United States and North Korea. A blue and gold stone appears in every story, connecting the stories together as a common element through the centuries. There’s some nice historical detail over the course of these tales, most notably in “Chaos,” which has a number of intricate combat scenes. However, that story is something of an outlier, as many of the others are more contemplative and dialogue-heavy with a lot of their drama happening off-page. The stated goal of the collection is to celebrate strong women. However, it falls short of this ambition, as many of the works center on famous men in the female protagonists’ orbits, rather than the women themselves.  

A sometimes-intriguing, if flawed, set of tales.