Survivors

Thrilling, superb, utterly charming.

"It is the price we pay for being survivors." Data.

yar never really got a great deal of onscreen development, yet despite this fact, Jean Lorra has taken every nugget, every morsel, every nuance and development of those nuances and made Tasha yar into a fully-flushed, Human character.

"That is the greatest danger in confronting evil: it is contagious. I have no doubt I did what was necessary. Why I did it I will probably question for the rest of my life." Jean-Luc Picard.

But not only did Lorra give Tasha Humanity, depth, thoughts and feelings and cares and everything else that turns someone we read about into someone we feel for - not only this, but the backstory which was so rarely hinted at onscreen has become something so much more...

"But the day the rape gang found the girl, just two days after the old woman's death, the knife did her little good." Page 14.

Even by the fourteenth page, this girl has our sympathies. By page 248, I wanted to cry as much as anyone else.
"'Gone?' Picard asked as if he still could not believe it, forcing Dr. Crusher to explain further, her voice tight with unshed tears." A simple line - even the description of the demise is simple. yet anyone having seen the show will agree with Guinan's assessment, made in the episode Yesterday's enterprise: "It was an empty death. A death without purpose."

"To lose his freedom would be far worse than death to such a man." Rikan, about Adin.

As empty as the death may have appeared, as sad as the episode where she died still was, watching it didn't really hit me; not terribly. not the way the death of a regular should at least. But absorbing this novel, really seeing who Tasha could have been and how she might have felt and thought and loved and lost then loved again, really makes the loss of such a profoundly emotional character that more painful.

"As her fiance fell, Yar felt something inside turn to ice. She rose to her knees, took aim at the one who had shot Dare, and drilled him through the forehead. And she kept shooting until that phaser was discharged, and she was the last of the bridge crew taken, backhanded by the Orion who finally captured her. She struck the wall, and blessed oblivion overcame her."

Jean Lorra pulls the heartstrings in every way imaginable - by Giving Tasha a history to make anyone sad, proud, hopeful and disgusted in equal measure. By making her such a real presence, a driving force, yet a vulnerable, caring person. By making her later love life such a tormented affair, and by then handing her the biggest conflict of all - to love, to friendship, to duty, to belief.

I haven't even started on Data's development in this book - but I don't need to. i couldn't do it justice, more than the author has done herself. All I can do is to announce my overwhelming feelings, my enjoyment of a fine work of art and my hope that if anyone is in need of a good read and a powerful story they remember this review.