Review by clong (2005-04-13)
This is one of Sturgeon's better known books but frankly I found it more thought-provoking than satisfying. It is a story about a group of characters who all deal with unfair, difficult childhoods, and each grow up in some way deeply flawed, but also each having evolved some sort of extraordinary psychic talent. Through a variety of circumstances they eventually come together to form a sort of symbiotic group organism, something bigger and better than any normal person.

I found the characters to be pretty one dimensional, and never developed much sympathy for any of them. Lone, the most interesting of them all, dies a sudden and rather unprepared death partway through the middle section. There is an amusing bit of irony in the anti-gravity mechanism one of them invents to move a stuck tractor that will remain forever unknown to the rest of humanity.

I had a particularly hard time making sense of the very beginning (about a psycho-eccentric-recluse-who-is-determined-to-raise-his-daughters-without-any-contact-with-or-awareness-of-a-world-outside-the-walls-of-his-estate part), but the book began to make more sense and move along better as the book progressed.