Mistral wrote:
and if he was that tender-hearted and they did expose their
superfluous
girls, why didn't Dayna have *lots* of little adopted sisters?<
Possibly Lauren was the only abandoned girl in that whole generation.
:-)
Maybe one of the people who knows more about social sciences than I do
could
say something, but it sounds a bit weird to me to just abandon one girl
in
twenty years?
Perhaps Lauren was orphaned and subsequently abandoned because none of her own people wanted the responsibility of taking care of her (another mouth to feed on limited resources, etc.) There's no reason to think that there would be lots of Sarran girls who'd lost their entire families.
It still seems odd to me. IIRC neither of the Mellanbys seem too interested in how the Sarrans live, and if Lauren is close to Dayna's age she'd have to have been adopted soon after they got there, which doesn't give them much time to find out. It doesn't seem likely that he'd have been going for long rambles in the hills near the Sarran villages :-).
Actually, that's also strange. They land on the planet, sink a spaceship into the ocean, and they spend a lot of their time zapping the Sarrans to keep them away-- and then they suddenly pick up this baby girl, we don't know where from but she's close to Dayna's age. It does sound more than a little bit colonial to me.
Jenny
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It's possible that Mellanby had some contact with the Sarrans when he arrived, and that relations broke down later. This could be any reason from "Mellanby is horrified to find that they kill unwanted baby girls, so rescues one and then withdraws into his ship" to "Mellanby kidnaps a baby girl to provide a companion for his daughter, and is forced to withdraw before the Sarrans can take revenge". Or something completely unrelated to baby girls.
-
Harriet Monkhouse -
Jenny Kaye