Freeze Frames

by Katharine Kerr

The first book of a grand, mystical family saga tells the story of Maggie Corey's descendants, five generations of mothers and daughters from various imaginary Californias who are stalked and defended by the men around them.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Paranormal

285 pages, Hardcover

First published March 6, 1995

About the author

Born in Ohio, 1944. Moved to San Francisco Bay Area in 1962 and has lived there ever since. Katharine Kerr has read extensively in the fields of classical archeology, and medieval and dark ages history and literature, and these influences are clear in her work. Her epic Deverry series has won widespread praise and millions of fans around the world.

Reviews

[Stef Rozitis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This ticked a lot of my boxes and yet was very unpredictable almost to the point of being confusing...but too well written to lose me entirely.

So those boxes: strong female characters that reference other female characters, heterosexuality that does not erase everything interesting about female character, spirituality without being straight-forward, good blend of dystopian and hopeful themes (for most of the book).

I have to say it lost me at the end (after Tiffany's central section). WTF happened? Even then there were some interesting details (about how those characters learn someone's culture) but WTF? I did not feel it was a strong ending. Not sure if it was meant to be humorous, dark or just plain old unexpected but it didn't seem to fit with the rest of the book which was read as finely crafted and going somewhere. I can forgive the lack of explaining things (for example I don't understand why we needed the earliest section but I can cope with that).

Anyway there was so much that was interesting about how complex relationships are. I liked many details about "Nick" and what his likes and especially dislikes are (showing how repressive religion was actually playing into his hands). I wasn't sure what to think about the rabbi, he was enigmatic but I had hoped more punch from him at some point. There was so much agency portrayed in the first section/story and then I thought that was going to be a theme, but the next story was about lack of agency and then two about agency but at the end...the thing....(I don't want to spoil it)

Happy for someone to argue that there was some point to it ending like that. I would read more of this series if that were a thing.

[Kal · Rating 4 out of 5]

This for me is one of those books that you love but which very few others share your love for. I remember that it was told in this somewhat schizophrenic style that a lot of people would have trouble with though, and so I appreciate that other perspective. But while a lot of people think that a book like this is an author's attempt at being intellectual or whatever, I think of this kind of thing as the author mixing things up a little and having a bit of an experiment with style or whatever.

I remember appreciating the way that the story's style related to the theme of a permissive attitude. This together with the fact that it took a slightly religious route to reach that message (at a time when I was interested in different perspectives on religion) didn't revolutionize my thinking exactly, but it gave me something to ponder. I suppose that with that in mind, that people who associate order with good and chaos with evil might have trouble with the message, which would be another hurdle for enjoying the book. Even people who agree with the message might find it a little preachy.

Maybe that's why a lot of people don't like this book. You need to have BOTH an appreciation for the style AND (not or) an appreciation of the message. I guess I was just the right niche market for this particular book when I read it.

Meanwhile, this review is from my memory of reading this book as a teenager. It's been quite a while since then, so who knows what the years would do to my perspective on this book. I'll have to re-read the book at some point and see if I feel any different.

[Simon Mcleish · Rating 3 out of 5]

Originally published on my blog here in May 2001.

The Faust legend is the inspiration for this science fiction novel. It begins in the sixties, when a middle aged professor at a minor university sells his soul to the devil for a younger body and takes up a new life as a drug dealer in the San Francisco hippie culture. His story is quite a straightforward version of the legend; it is the role of the virtuous Margaret that he meets in California which forms the main part of the novel. The devil, in the form of student Nick Harrison, wants to destroy Margaret, but is unable to; when she becomes pregnant, he thinks he has won, but she just points out that this is the nineteen sixties and has the child. From this point, the novel consists of a series of episodes in the lives of Margaret's descendants as Nick tries to attack them. The longest is the previously published novella Resurrection, about Margaret's great granddaughter Tiffany. This has a paranoid plot like a Philip K. Dick story: Tiffany is recovering from a few moments of clinical death when she begins to realise that she is no longer in the same reality as that in which she grew up.

The episodes which make up Freezeframes are perhaps a little too disjointed for it to feel that it is a unified whole, but its main problem is that it has too many ideas. The best of these is the concept of the devil undertaking a personal vendetta against Maggie's family in a world which barely believes in him, but we also have telepathic contact by alien invaders and alternate worlds (both favourites of Dick). The main stories are interesting in themselves, and the novel is well written, but it remains unsatisfying.

[Raven · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very trippy

[Benjamin Speers · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF'd after a hundred and fifty pages or so. Freeze Frames is filled with good ideas but they're executed horribly, to the point where most of the book is simply boring. A woman trying to fight off alien possession? America falls to a fascist coup? The story of a family down through the generations in the future?

But the actual stories are practically devoid of all tension or conflict. Nothing seems to actually happen for the majority of them. By the timeI got to the fourth narrative and got subjected to thirty pages of the protagonist going home and looking in a book shop I gave up.

The other problem is the stories are all disconnected as hell. Granted, I skipped half of them, but the first three had seemingly no connection, and the circumstances of the protagonists were so bizarrely unique that the whole "family through the ages" aspect breaks down completely as an excersize in worldbuilding.

Normally any story that fails to hold my interest enough for me to finish it gets an automatic one star, but I mildly enjoyed the third story to a degree, so I'm tentatively giving this one a 3/10.

[Tiny · Rating 4 out of 5]

An anthology following a family branch over time. It has what I love: characters whose heads you can get into, friendship and cool SF.

[Sarah Thornton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strange book, slightly uncomfortable to read but cohesive and with a strong finish.

[Jeanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This may be one of my favorite of Kit's non-Deverry books. The aspects of a character (or characters) throughout time intrigued me from the first time I read it. Highly recommend!

[Kacey M · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was confused pretty much the entire time but it's so well written that I loved it.

[Kathy Sebesta · Rating 2 out of 5]

Weird, weirder, weirdest. Even the LSD doesn't seem out of line. Ostensibly the first in a series but I don't see evidence of another volume. That's OK, I wouldn't go for it anyway.

[Nippy Katz · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of short stories involving several generations of a family. It's packaged as a novel but each story could be read on its own. This is science fiction with literary fiction aspirations. It's character driven. It's a precursor to the Polar City series in the sense that it describes events on Earth prior to the space colonization that resulted in the Republic of the Polar City books.

I read the whole thing although I was tempted to give up a few times. Kerr does better with a more plot centric story.

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book because it was written by Katharine Kerr. I remember liking it for the most part but don't remember the specifics because it was a long time ago.

[Ranjit1george · Rating 1 out of 5]

All that I had the say after reading this book was "WHAT THE!!". This book is about a bunch of disconnected and incomplete stories about different generations.
This was disappointing.

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this a while ago and while I liked it I was left hanging at the end wanting more and perhaps another book to tie some of the story together.

[Kat · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of short stories set in a shared universe, not sufficiently united by theme or content to really hang together as a whole. Individually the stories are mediocre to good.

[SBC · Rating 2 out of 5]

Both fantasy and sci-fi as we have the devil and aliens. I didn't like it. It was interesting but didn't make much sense to me at the time I read it.