# "Transformation", by Carol Berg: A Review



## littlemissattitude (Mar 16, 2004)

“Transformation” by Carol Berg

I know I am really going to enjoy a book when, very early on, I find myself wondering what the characters are doing during the times in the lives of the characters that the author has chosen not to tell the reader about. The story skips forward a day or a week between the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next, and I start trying to imagine what the characters did and said during that missing time. And not only do I try to figure this out, the characters have been so well-drawn, the background of history and culture has been so fully realized, even the climate is described in vivid enough detail, that I can make some pretty good guesses as to what, were that world real, might have gone on.

Books like this are, unfortunately, few and far between. Fortunately, Carol Berg’s “Transformation” is one of those few novels that stimulated my imagination almost from the first page, quite an achievement for a first novel. It is a difficult thing to write that vividly and with that much detail without having the detail overshadow the plot and make the all the characters seem like cardboard cutouts. In Seyonne, the Ezzarian slave, and in Aleksander, son of the Derzhi Emperor, Berg has managed to create two characters that I found myself caring deeply about because they are as realistic as the background she has set them to act on. Neither is perfect. Neither is even very nice all the time. But Berg managed to make me care about Aleksander and what happened to him even as he shows his arrogance and cruelty in his early treatment of Seyonne, who he has purchased seemingly on a whim.

As expertly drawn as Berg’s two main characters are, so has she put them into a world that is richly detailed and logically realized. The cultures of the Derzhi and the Ezzarians feel like real cultures, and the conflicts between the members of those cultures and how those conflicts play out ring true. This is one of the aspects of “Transformation” that impressed me most. These cultures are so fully realized and so realistic that if I were in the position of teaching a cultural anthropology course, I would seriously consider teaching this book as a way of illustrating real anthropological principles using this fictional setting.

Having said all this, the point must be made that “Transformation” is not a perfect novel. The demon-infested Khelid characters come off as stock villains. Even absent the influence of the demons that possess them for much of the book, they still seem only to want to conquer the Derzhi Empire, but Berg never really tells us about their motivations for this desire. This is something that I would have liked to know. She just does not explore their culture fully enough. There is also the issue of Seyonne’s betrayal by a childhood friend, that resulted in Seyonne’s capture and enslavement by the Derzhi. The reasons given for this betrayal just don’t seem complete enough, at least to me. A third problem that I had with the book is that there is not enough of Lydia, Aleksander’s spirited fiancee, in the story. I can see why Berg made the choices about Lydia’s character that she did, but Lydia is a great character and I would have liked to see more of her. Still, within the whole of the novel, these are small enough issues that they ultimately don’t matter enough to mar enjoyment of a rip-roaringly good story.


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## Brian G Turner (Mar 16, 2004)

Thanks for that - I'm starting the overhaul proper and building content this week.


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## Jayaprakash Satyamurthy (Mar 16, 2004)

An excellent review. I am reading the book at present, so I'm glad to have read a spoiler-free but insightful overview.


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## littlemissattitude (Mar 16, 2004)

Thank you for that.  It was a difficult review to write, and I wasn't sure how successful I had been.  I wanted to keep it as spoiler-free as possible because I know there are people here still reading the book, but I didn't know how much sense it would make with so little of the story mentioned.


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## Jayaprakash Satyamurthy (Mar 17, 2004)

That's a problem I often face, too, since I try to post fairly useful assessments of everything I read on forums like this. 

It would seem hard to review a work like, say, Ted Sturgeon's Venus Plus X or Fred Pohl's Man Plus without giving away crucial plot elements. I know that some established reviewers (John Clute spirngs to mind) often reveal crucial elements in their reviews, but I just don't feel its fair. Call it a literary analysis then, and don't let people who are looking for a review - a pre-view of the book, as it were, read it under a false assumption!


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## littlemissattitude (Mar 17, 2004)

What I ususally try to do is to tell a bit about where the story begins...and then leave it at that before going on to give an indication of my experience in reading the book.  I don't know how often I actually acheive that ideal, but that's my goal.

With this review, however, since there are people here in process of reading the book right now, I wasn't sure I even wanted to do that.  But I don't think you can review a book without mentioning _anything_ about what is actually in the book.  So I chose to talk a little bit about the main characters.  I even hesitated to mention too explicitly the parts of the story that I was uncomfortable with or found lacking, but I finally decided that it wouldn't be an honest review if I didn't mention those at all, or if I just said there were things I thought could have been a bit better without mentioning what those things were.

The spoiler question is a really fine line to walk in writing books reviews.  I know that I've read reviews and then thought, why should I bother to read the book?  The reviewer just told me how the thing comes out in the end.  I really strive not to do that.


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