Bookish Thoughts

By the time I got to the fourth and final Sharing Knife  book, I was used to the slow, meandering pace of these books. I was happy to just hang out in this world with these characters for a couple hundred pages until the excitement started. Bujold has created a fascinating world and populated it with a wealth of nice, interesting characters who I enjoyed spending time with. If there's a fault with this book (and series really), it's that Bujold can't quite bring herself to let anything all that bad happen to her characters. There's certainly something to be said for that. It's nice to read a book where you know everyone will be safe. Though it does drain a lot of suspense out of the action scenes. This is all to say that it took a while for this story to grow on me. It's slow and not much happens, which is different from a lot of stories you get. But I did end up coming around, and I ended up really liking this book and series. I can definitely see myself re...

The third book in Bujold's Sharing Knife  series is incredibly slow. It follows the first half of Dag and Fawn's honeymoon. Which is largely an idyllic time. Which is kind of boring. Most of the book chronicles their trip downriver on a boat. But it takes about 100 pages to get there. And since it's clear that that's where everything is leading, I was just impatient to get there. Instead Bujold spends a lot of time setting up new characters and potential conflicts and generally building up the world a bit. The climax does eventually kick in, and it's thrilling a satisfying. But I struggled with the rest of the book. What's interesting is that I'm finding I like it better in retrospect (and having finished the fourth book). Bujold ultimately convinced me that it was fun to just hang out in this world with these characters, and I'm remembering the book fondly. I'd probably enjoy it more on a re-read than I did the first time through.

The second Sharing Knife book picks up mere hours after the first one ends, and then it takes a while to get started. A lot of that is probably due to the fact that the book was split up in separate installments to sell better. But it works out alright if you read them back to back. And when the action finally does kick in, it's well worth the wait. This pick, as I expected, picks up and ties off most of the threads that were left dangling at the end of the previous book. Fawn's family has been mollified, but there's still the issue of Dag's family. Fawn and Dag are firmly a couple at this point, so there's less courtship and more stability between them. Which means a bit less excitement. Which means that it's time for the monsters to come back. And Fawn can use all the stuff she learned in the previous book to save the day. There's a lot of fun world building in this book. A lot of characters working at cross purposes to either uphold the status quo (wh...

This may be the longest I've gone between buying a book and reading that book. I picked it up at a used book store a year and a half ago because it was written by Lois McMaster Bujold. But then I found out that it was part of a series and, this being Bujold, I knew I'd want to read the whole series. What's more, the series is supposed to be more like a single novel broken into four installments than four distinct books. So I waited and looked for the other books and never found them and this one sat neglected on my shelf. This may have been a good thing. In my quest for the rest of the series I learned that, while it's billed as fantasy, it's much closer to romance. That knowledge helped me adjust my expectations. I knew going in that the book was going to focus more on the relationship between Dag and Fawn than on the supernatural malices that populated their world. And in reading The Vorkosigan Series I came to expect Bujold's fondness for May-December roma...