The Sharing Knife: Beguilement (Lois McMaster Bujold)

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 […]

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

Share