The matriarchal Life on the plains of Nebraska weren't what Iris Angharad dreamed of. She dreamed of joining the hand-picked teams that were working to terraform Venus. When she finished her farm chores, she linked to lessons on her screen: biology, chemistry, hydroponics. Her hard work paid off and the government of Earth paid for her lessons. The boy she met, sent to her village to make repairs in the town hall, shared her dream. They became bondmates and parents at the age of 16. (!) Now, Iris leaves her child with her mother and studies in the (Venus) Islands Institute in Caracas, where she will be prepared, if she can cut it, to live in the upper atmosphere of Venus, and work with others to make the domes on Venus' surface that will sustain Humans until the planet's surface can support humans.

This book is really about human politics, and how they stand in the way of accomplishing the tasks that an assembled team is working on. The characters, as other reviewers commented, are not likeable. So it makes the reader wonder: what did Ms Sargent set out to do here? Still and all, I enjoyed it for its world-building theme, as that's what I dreamt of when I was young: that we (Americans) would be going to Mars. Ha! ( )

This book surprised me - I did not expect it to be that good. Although this is a SciFi novel, the story itself is simply just an excellent story about how people behave, think, feel, interact in response to ambition, love, and aspirations that are bigger than themselves. It just goes to show that good writing is simply good writing regardless of the genre. I really appreciated the development of many of the characters in the novel. Almost none of them remain unchanged in response to the huge undertaking of the early stages of terraforming a planet - Venus. Although the emphasis of the story is on character development, Sargent does not go lightly on the thinking and planning that would be required to terraform a planet. Indeed, these physical real challenges are what drives much of the character development in the story. This is what good Sci Fi does - places people in a future situation and then explores how people would respond. This is an excellent book. I look forward to reading the two sequels: Venus of Shadows and Child of Venus. ( )

A big long family-saga type book. The narrator's mother has ambitions to become mayor of her agrarian village and to leave a successful farm to her daughter. However, her daughter insists on spending all of her free time studying online, with dreams of becoming part of the ambitious project to settle Venus. She is rebellious and bitter about her mother's failure to understand her dreams - but when she succeeds, after great effort, she in turn doesn't understand her son, who feels that the Venus Project is all a big PR scam set up by the Earth government, who doesn't understand that cooperating with the more technologically advanced people who live in artificial space habitats would be the more sensible way to go.
Well done, interesting book, but it didn't grab me enough to make me go seek out the sequels. ( )

I wish that it had been more about terraforming Venus and less about the people. I admit that I dispised the main character Iris by a 100 pages, by the half way point I hated her, and when I peeked ahead and found she died I was truly happy. This book is screwing up my reading schedule. ( )

Ms. Sargent has written a rather detailed description of Earth with changing social values and technological conditions in the far future. It is a sci-fi book whose target market is women rather than men in my opinion. She describes the life of Iris a young woman that longs to leave the boring life of a Plains woman who is bound to the land, farming and the passage of this farm land for generation to generation through the maternal side of a family. Men play little role in this culture, when they are adults they are encouraged to leave to work as migrant labour, coming home every-so-often to visit family but there is little to the traditional family. The book deals with issues of Iris wanting more out her life and her struggles to take part in a childhood dream of working on a terra-forming project on Venus.

Pamela Sargent does a good job in describing this world and the social issues surrounding it...but for me it very dry and moved at a slow pace....there was little in the form of drama that did not involve a woman's issue, men floated in and out of her life and seemed quite superfluous. I frankly could not finish the book having stopped after 2/3 of the way through. It just was not a compelling page turner for me. ( )