Look aliveSee these bonesWhat you are nowWe were onceAnd just like we areYou'll be dust...—Nada Surf, "See These Bones," from the album Lucky (2008)I must've first read The Falling Woman shortly after it came out, more than thirty years ago—but I'm afraid I didn't remember much about it when I picked up this handsome trade paperback reissue from Open Road. That's entirely my fault; upon this rereading, I found myself thoroughly amazed by Pat Murphy's Nebula Award-winning novel, and how adroitly ...

The Falling Woman is a slowish, atmospheric read which got hooks into me and wouldn’t let go. I love the setting — the archaeological dig, the tensions of the excavation team, even the awkwardness between the long estranged mother and daughter… It feels like the kind of site it is: laden with history, meaning, and maybe even ghosts. It’s hard to describe, and to do so would be a disservice if you want to read the book, I think; the whole point is the slow unwinding, the building of tension and u...

I read this one because it won a Nebula Prize. But, as I am finding with the Nebula, I don't really agree that this is the best of sci-fi in 1986, a year that Bujold published three (!) Vorkosigan novels including one one her best, The Warrior's Apprentice, Asimov's fifth Foundation novel, Foundation and Earth, and Stanislaw Lem's excellent Fiasco.Murphy's novel is entirely too predictable with one-dimensional characters that are just not all that interesting, a hokey hallucinatory plot that did...

I absolutely loved this book. It had several plot strands, each of which I really enjoyed and was then delighted when they dovetailed beautifully at the end. The characterisations are wonderful and the sense of time and place is impeccable. Highly recommend

I remember almost nothing about this book, which I presumably read because it won the Nebula for Best Novel in 1987. Jogging my memory, I see Mara's short, cogent 2-star review:"I bought this due to its high number of good reviews, but found it a complete snooze-fest. Essentially its 272 pages of gorgeous prose about 2 people I could not bring myself to care about in the slightest. ..." https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...Looking at my old booklog and her list of books published, my luck wit...

I wanted to love this mother-daughter story, but somehow I never quite connected with it emotionally.
I liked the structure and the changing POVs, but the story itself left me wanting more.

This novel, which won the Nebula Award in 1988, has a lot of promise that never quite coheres into a satisfying whole. Among its strengths is an impeccably-crafted sense of place; I was always vividly immersed in every locale, especially the archeological dig of Mayan ruins at which most of the action occurs. Another is a clear-eyed, intimate portrait of two women — a reluctant mother and her long-ago-abandoned daughter — as they navigate their way past their own inner demons and the gaps that k...

When one of the local workers on a Yucatan archeological site breaks his ankle, the local hospital fixes him up but his mother, the cook for the archeological team, insists that the local curandera be brought in to check him out as well. This old woman also wants to meet Elizabeth Butler, the middle-aged and well-known leader of the team. She identifies Butler as a witch.Butler is not bothered by this opinion. She can even appreciate it. All her life she has lived with shadows of the past inhabi...

Perhaps I'm just optimistic, but I expected more from an award winning book. Then again, maybe I should have known better; one of the comments on the back of the book was that the writing is "generally above average". If that's the best thing you can find to put on a book cover, watch out.I don't have a lot of bad things to say about the book. But neither do I have a lot of good things to say about it. The characters were strong, but I just didn't quite care about them. The details of an archaeo...

Narrated in alternating first-person narratives by archaeologist Elizabeth Butler and her adult daughter Diane, Falling Woman explores relationships between individuals, between past and present, between theory abstract and reality, between physical environment and culture.Elizabeth, a long-divorced expert on Mayan archaeology, is in the process of excavating at Dzibilichaltun when her daughter arrives unannounced. Diane lost her father, her job, and her boyfriend (who turned out to be married) ...