The Plot
Fawn Bluefield, young, unmarried, and unhappily pregnant, has left her family’s farm and headed for the “big city” in search of a less embarrassing and painful future. She runs into more trouble than expected on the road, and finds herself being chased by a malice, or blight bogle. Dag Redwing, a Lakewalker patroller in pursuit of the same malice, rescues her once, and then assists her in killing the malice. The experience unfortunately costs the life of Fawn’s fetus and causes something strange to happen to a Sharing Knife belonging to Dag. The two soon succumb to mutual attraction in spite of the sure objections of both of their peoples.
My Thoughts
Bujold is one of the few authors I can read most anything by. I’m a big fan of her Vorkosigan series, but I also liked Chalion, and the other random short stories I’ve read. So I was pre-disposed to like this series as well. In fact, the chance of win was 99.999999%, and because of her own statements that the books were pretty closely linked and would definitely be coming out one after the other, I decided to wait until all were released before reading any of them.
In this series, Bujold decided to try something different. These first two books were written without a contract, without a deadline or any sort of external publishing force requiring her to stick to a certain subject or theme. So she was able to write what she wanted and experiment — or not experiment, as the case may have been — with themes and conflicts she found interesting. And, if one is familiar with her earlier work, the subjects she returns to here should not be especially surprising. Emotional battery, women’s health and fertility, and disability have all been explored by her in previous efforts, and they are again important in Beguilement. [Bujold herself has written a bit about her motivations in writing this series, both on 
My first comment on your review probably shouldn’t be about Clan of the Cave Bear, should it? :) But that’s the bit where I feel I have the most to say. Heh.
You’re right that the best part of the book is the characters, and the rest is kind of ho-hum. So it’s a really good thing that I like the two main characters, despite all their annoying clicheness. Though I wouldn’t say I like them a _lot_. Just enough to find them interesting enough to keep reading.
So here’s the bit about Clan of the Cave Bear. It was 9th grade, first year of AP English. I overheard my English teacher recommending these books to a girl in my class. (This may have been the same teacher who chastised me for trying to read War and Peace.)
Something about their conversation intrigued me enough to get the books. I don’t know if she had briefly described the setting — which was definitely science fictional — or maybe had hinted it was rather ‘adult’ and so piqued my interest that way. But I borrowed one from the library.
I liked the first one. I was, and still am, interested in the minutiae of people surviving and stockpiling and creating things and like that. (Which is why Survivor is so disappointing, but I digress..)
I kept reading the series, but I did skip most of the sex scenes. But the mostly-skipped sex scenes were what made the most impression on me. Most graphic book I’d read up to that point and really for some time afterward.
I don’t know if I ever finished the series. I think I stopped at some point. I remember a long, boring trek across a glacier… What is interesting for awhile begins to pale after too many books of the same.
It was really the sex scenes that made the biggest impression on me too (Clan of the Cave Bear). It’s definitely what I mostly remember about the books themselves. I only read the 3 books that were out at the time when I found them. Never went back.
Wasn’t there a movie around the time we were in junior high? I remember people knowing some, like, hand-gesture thing that was supposed to mean, “Let’s do it.”
I never saw the movie, but I do think there was one. I know in book 2 there’s a lengthy internal dialogue about ‘why doesn’t he just make his sign’ and then she’d know he wanted to do it and she’d… I guess lie down and spread her legs? Who knows.
Yea, there’s a movie. It’s not too bad. But maybe I was mostly interested because of the signing. It used to show up on Lifetime now and then.
I was really getting the Cordelia/Aral vibe myself, especially because of the “we’re thrust together into this situation but we will bond as we handle it resourcefully” part and the fact that she was obviously going to end up joining a culture foreign to her.