More of a 1.5 of 5.0.

Completely a case of me missing the quote on the cover that mentions "[the] fair amount of polymorphous hot sexual action." Whoops. Not what I was expecting when I grabbed this at the library.

I think that I was supposed to empathize with Ilario's crappy situation/lot in life, but mostly I was annoyed with him. He's selfish, pouty, and irritatingly precocious. (I could have done without the first-person narrative, too. Whatever happened to good ol' fashioned third-person limited?)

However, I finished this. I've found that I have no patience for books I really, really dislike as of late. As such, I have to give Mary Gentle credit for writing an intriguing story. ( )

Set in the same world as Ash, some time before the events of that mighty tome. Where Ash looks at (among many other things!) the varied roles of women in the medieval European military, Ilario looks at varied non-gender binary roles. The title character is intersex (calling himself/herself 'hermaphrodite' and using pronouns according to however he/she is currently presenting in societies that are all too binary); he falls in with a eunuch, whose sister is trans and whose cousin is the ceremonial-beard-wearing Pharoah Queen; and they meet up with a lost Chinese ship with yet another perspective of the role of eunuchs in society.

There's a parallel theme of slavery vs freedom; and there's also a whole lot about the development of perspective in Western art. The plot meanwhile centres around Ilario being the unwitting centre of a political scandal that looks likely to end up either with her being murdered or with his home country being invaded by Carthage. The Penitence that was so important in Ash plays its own role here; we also encounter a golem, and a goat-footed girl who I was sorry we never came back to (though she may not be): Ilario's jerkhood towards her was related to how he perceives himself and I was expecting there to be some resolution of that. ( )

A complex prequel set in the World created for "Ash", but set considerably earlier. Attila is the Roman emperor, there are very strange happenings around Tunis/Carthage, and an hermaphrodite painter, survives political intrigues to bear a child and become an important person in Visigothic Spain. We are a long way from Tolkien in this one. ( )