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.




View all my reviews.

Comments

[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.