I read this a couple of months ago, and held off on reviewing it -- because, honestly, I'm embarassed to have read the whole thing. I was looking for something trashy, but this was really awful. The story is told from the perspective of the amazon savage "war leader" Jalav, in a constructed idiom (and rather unconventional English syntax) to emphasize her alienation from the relatively medieval society in which she is sojourning. Her language alienated me too. Although she learned to read in the course of this novel, Jalav still called chairs, tables, and beds "platforms," and lanterns were "boxes with lights in them." Men and women were always and only "males" and "females." The words 'day' and 'night' were eliminated, to be replaced with "feyd" and "darkness."

The plot is terribly slow, and Jalav is a captive for most of the book. She gets raped and beaten many times, and the "oath" of the title is her coerced swearing by her goddess Mida that she will obey a certain man, who subsequently domesticates her and passes her around to his pals. There's plenty of psychological and cultural justification for the sequence of events. Then, at the end, the pace picks up considerably, culminating in Jalav's ultimate rape by a demon-god, with the apparent connivance of Mida.

It seems that this book (the second in a series of five) is intended to establish a set of affections and enmities that will motivate the remainder of a saga. But, ugh.

good book ( )