Passage

[lightreads]

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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Comments

[applewoman.livejournal.com]

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

I was raised and still live in the Midwest (right around where Bujold currently lives), and this series just doesn't do much for me. I love her other work, though, especially the Vorkosigan books.

I heard her talk about the first Sharing Knife book at a reading she did a few years ago. She said she found it challenging to write a novel whose main plot was the romance, with the fantasy world as a background. Though her other books often do include romance as part of the plot (Cordelia/Aral OTP!), the Vorkosigan books especially tend to be driven by the action, or a mystery, or something much more interesting than Dag-and-Fawn (whose relationship I find pretty dull).

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

I'm torn because I support her cross-genre impulses, and I have a particularly feminist interest in seeing romance as a women's literature taken more seriously. As the sort of thing one can and ought to write good books about. And yet this romance? Meh.

[quietann.livejournal.com]

Passage was my least favorite of this series. I do think the "absent gods" idea -- meaning the people must rely on themselves -- is important, but it's not well developed at all.

This is not my favorite series at all, but there are bits I really like, and I was able to put aside my age-squick enough to really enjoy the first two books.

It almost feels like LMB got tired of the books mid-way through.

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's not active dislike I'm fostering over here. Just underwhelmed disappointment.

[readerjane]

This series fell flat for me, too. I kept waiting for it to turn into, y'know... Bujold.

I know from LMB's 2008 Denvention speech that she was trying to tell a story where the romance was the main thing, but that didn't mean she needed to give the SF or the adventure story short shrift.

There needed to be *some* resolution to the Malice thread: not necessarily kicking all Malice asses back to the hell they came from, or building detente with them, but something. The series is over and we still don't know where they originated or how many there are or whether there's a really effective way to fight them. Well, I guess Whit's weapon is a step up, but still.

A very frustrating series overall. Enough sparks of Bujold's true abilities to keep me reading, but nowhere near enough to satisfy.

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the fourth book yet. Will eventually, when I feel like it. But even before you said, I'd guessed we were getting no real resolution.

I was saying to someone above that I have a feminist reader's interest in the cross-genre work she's talking about. I've been saying for a while that romance as women's literature gets denegrated a lot, including by me, which only means we need smart women to be writing it. And yet . . . underwhelmed.

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

hee! I remember having that exact same reaction to the "child" foreplay. Also, yeah, Gary Stu Dag... he's not exactly a run-of-the-mill guy.

I actually liked Passage more than the previous two (I haven't read the last one yet), as I kind of hate Bujold-does-early-stage-romance-- though I am in general not sympathetic towards Dag's "wow, if I just do something, even though I don't know what, I can change everything!!" Um, gonna run into some unintended consequences really fast there, dude.

(My probably slightly more coherent review is here (http://charlie-ego.livejournal.com/21088.html).)

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

Pretty much "word" to your whole review.

*zigzags conversation slightly* I do like what you were talking about, tracing a romance past the initial infatuation stages. It has been driving me nuts for a while now the way she talks about romances. Aside from the whole "every good romance story naturally ends with a birth," thing, which ug ug ug! Um. Anyway. Just that she's said in a few places that everything after A Civil Campaign was like a codicil, because I assume she did the thing she wanted to do. And here I am, way more interested in the details of established married life than the rush of the beginning. So points for that idea, except that Dag and Fawn are still pretty bland to me.