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

[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.