Komarr

Komarr by Lois McMaster Bujold

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Wow, this book is a lot less complicated than I remember from the first and only time I read it five years ago. (Though actually, it's equally fair that I'm a much more complicated reader, so).



It's a good book – unfolding mystery, wit, emotional tension, new landscapes for the universe. It's just the thematic punches were far more straight-on than I remember – keep an eye out for things that fall in this book and things that are caught, add a twist of identity games, and you've pretty much got it. Two unrelated observations:



1. Wow, it's kind of amazing how Ekaterin codes perfectly as a lesbian trapped in a miserable heterosexual marriage for the first half of this book. From a certain set of textual reading habits, that's exactly what her exhaustion and distance and sexual disconnection mean.



2. You know, I've studied politics and I've studied psychology, and I much less seriously dabbled in history. And I am still really unconvinced by the Komarr integration scheme. I just flat out don't buy it as anything more than naive hope, and, um, Aral Vorkosigan is not naive. He does have a reason to want to redeem the subjugation of Komarr, though, huh. But, I mean, seriously? Two separate planets with a huge spatial and communications gap, a bloody and highly resented conquering (I'm not the only one who keeps analogizing to Ireland, right?), and a completely different cultural conception of power structures are supposed to integrate via the occasional cross-cultural marriage? Ooooooh-kay…



Anyway. The last scene of this book still made me squeal and go, "oh, Miles!" so, you know, it's not like it bothered me that much.




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Passage

The Sharing Knife: Passage by Lois McMaster Bujold

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
Book three in this romance-fantasy quartet with the cross-cultural marriage. Okay, maybe . . . maybe there's a reason you don't see much midwestern-influenced fantasy out there?



Wait, no, I'm being cheap. See, here's the thing:

Dag said more slowly, "He was just an ordinary patroller, before his knife got broken. But if ordinary folks can't fix the world, it's not going to get fixed. There are no lords here. The gods are absent."

Putting aside that this is an incredibly disingenuous thing for Dag to say, considering he's spent the series developing his unexpected magic powers. She's written books about lords and books about gods, and in theory I'm all on board for a universe that changes up those power discourses. It just turns out, I don't particularly want it to be this universe, where the solution to the world's troubles appears to be a thought just a few notches above 'can't we all just get along.' And also a universe where Dag calls Fawn "child" when they're in bed, argh argh argh! Where was I? Oh, right. There's homespun wisdom, sure, but mostly these are truths so simplified, they've lost all their density for me.



I suspect someone raised in this dialect, in the region that inspired these landscapes and this river, would find more here. I . . . didn't.




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