Review: Hymn, Ken Scholes
Hymn wraps up Ken Scholes’ Psalms of Isaak series, and while everything finally comes to a head, things just feel a bit too mushed together.
Hymn, sent my way by Tor Books, is trying very hard to eat its cake and have it too when it comes to being, as it dubs itself on the dust jacket, “science-fantasy.” And, on some level, Ken Scholes succeeds on merging the two here to cap off his Psalms of Isaak series. After all, the titular Isaak is made of metal, but he lives in a world where dreams can be shared among plenty of people and there are children of Younger Gods. No, really.
But to make a long story short, there are a lot of plot events in this book, and while Scholes covers both sides of the story with his point of view characters … and I can’t believe I’m saying this … it all feels a little scattered and could have done with some more content. One chapter contains several different perspectives, broken up by the character’s name atop their sections, and the end result is that, while the story moves at a very respectable clip, causing major events and then hopping around to see how its cast , it also doesn’t leave much time for things like character development aside from some all-too-brief musing, mostly for Rudolfo and Jin Li Tam.
Speaking of Rudolfo, though, there’s one particular word choice that Scholes makes, over and over again, that made this reader twitch every time she saw it. It’s his use of the word Gypsy. I understand it’s been part of the series since the beginning. But here’s Jessica Reidy on the subject of what the word actually means, and even the Merriam-Webster dictionary points out that it’s “sometimes offensive“. This book is set on literally another world, settled long ago by humans, that’s actually called Lasthome. And sure, Rudolfo is one of our protagonists and point of view characters, but … it just … didn’t work for me, and it made it harder to enjoy the book each time it appeared.
I wanted to, though! The layers of conflicting religions, technology and the past coming back to affect the present are usually my cup of tea. But again, things whipped back and forth too fast to let all of the moves settle in and really play out fully. Jin ended up as my favorite character, and even then, I read a lot about the House of Tam’s general family traditions, which started to grate after a while, too.
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Ultimately, this reviewer suspects that Scholes will have his fans no matter what. I just don’t think I’m really among them, and while fans of the Psalms of Isaak will perhaps enjoy seeing the series title dropped here (although I shan’t reveal in what context), those who stopped with earlier books might not find anything here to entice them back.