Darksight Dare by Lois Mcmaster Bujold

[lightreads]

Darksight Dare

4/5. New Penric novella. I keep complaining these are slight and boring, but this one turns it up a notch. And alert! Alert! We have demon POV! Is it the demon we all want POV from? No. But it’s one of the things that makes this one more interesting, so I’ll take it.

I will also say that this book sets up a magical disability cure situation that actually landed more or less okay with me. Partly it’s not really a cure, it’s replacing sight with a kind of magical perception that is markedly different from human in both directions, less and more useful. And also because she challenged the overtly stated position that the disabled person had to have this, life was not worth living, etc. Did she challenge it with particular depth? No. But again, I’ll take it.

I did think for a hot second that this one would also complicate the role providence plays in these books. Penric does that thing he does where he has problem A, and unrelated person B comes along at exactly the right time, and Pen goes, “Oh, well, you must be the solution to this problem because that’s how narrative providence works,” and he jams them together and it all works out beautifully. Providence, in this world, being something of a fig leaf for wild degrees of coincidence and narrative convenience. Here, Pen does that with even more slapdashery than usual, and it gets much messier before it gets better. I thought maybe, maybe she was finally ready to engage with the whole mechanism of these books, but no, not really.

Content notes: References to suicidal ideation, mutilation