Not Even My Wife Reads This

Just finished In the Garden of Iden, by Kage Baker. It's the first of her series of Company novels. It's a restricted time travel series — the super people from the future can go back in time but can't bring items with them or change observed history. So they go back, establish bases in remote areas, and recruit kids who were otherwise going to die (and whose deaths were not important enough to count as observed history). Then they make the kids immortal, train them for years, then have them work (essentially forever) to Help the Future.

I'd read a couple of her shorter Company stories and liked them a lot. This one, not so much. It's set in the time of the Spanish Inquisition and the English Reformation / counter-Reformation / counter-counter-Reformation. So the background story involves lots of alleged Christians killing each other in brutal ways over relatively minor doctrinal differences. And the foreground story mostly involves collecting rare plants from a garden, before they go extinct, and a romance between an immortal and a mortal.

Not bad, but it read more like an introduction to a series than a self-contained book. Lots of development of the main character; not a lot of plot.