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.