So we pick up where we left off in part 1, and find our intrepid heroes on their wedding night. And it seems we’re not yet over with the naive girl’s firsts. Fawn’s now healed up enough from her miscarriage that they dare try to do IT. But of course Dag’s still got a broken arm, so she has to do all the work. Poor farmgirl!
Fortunately there’s a bit of magic and plot point in the middle of this sex scene. And also fortunately, once we get it over with, the story seems free to move on from there. Much like how the story got much better in the first book after the first sex scene was over with.
In this book, we’re off to meet Dag’s family. And we find out more about the sharing knives. Which seemed to me to contradict things in the first book. I thought any bone knife could be primed by any Lakewalker’s heart. Both bones and hearts being in short supply, it’d seem to be rather essential. But apparently a knife has to be set up by a maker in advance for a particular person. It can be switched later, but still requires a maker, and still has to be before it gets stabbed into someone’s heart. Except later on, they’re talking about killing a bunch of people and regretting their lack of knives available for the task.. except none of those knives if they did have them would’ve been ready for any of the intended dead people.
Dag goes off to fight some more malices and stuff, and Fawn’s left back at camp to deal with the in-laws. We get a bunch of domestic stuff and political stuff from her end, and some battle and stuff from his end. In that way, it was reminding me quite a lot of the Vorkosigan books. Domestic stuff, political stuff, tricky dire survival situation stuff.
Dag also reminded me a bit of Miles, mostly in the way Bujold was treating him. He’s missing a hand to start with, then she breaks his other arm. Fortunately we have Lakewalker healers who can fix him right up soon enough (when the broken arm thing was getting old plotwise). Then he’s free to run off and get himself hurt even worse, in more interesting ways. And, again, the healer magic can do some, but not everything. Likewise with Miles, advanced medical technology can fix him up quite a bit, so then he has to go and get himself beat up in more interesting ways that’re harder to fix.
I liked this book better than the first one. And I actually can’t really predict where this series is going in the next book. So it’ll be interesting to find out.
Yeah, I wasn’t really sure where she was going with the books either. Not being able to predict was nice. She seemed to have set herself a quite difficult task.
Well, if the main problem at the heart of the series is that the Lakewalkers and the farmers don’t get along and are even working at cross-purposes, then that’s something you wouldn’t have to solve quickly. In IC time. They can go off, raise kids, who raise kids, who slowly begin to change the world.
Except that the malices seem to be increasing, so they probably don’t have generations to sort this out.
Which leaves the evangelical plot, where the two of them roam around telling people and showing people and warning people. Maybe picking up a few disciples along the way.
Which is somewhat the plot of Le Guin’s series that starts with Gifts. Well, maybe not so close in plot as that, but it does remind me a lot of it as I think of it. Maybe because I read the two series so closely together.
Read the next books so I can discuss this without spoiling!!
Yeah, encountering a sex scene like that right at the beginning was a little weird. I’m with you on the inability to predict, too.
I think that just has to do with the way the books were split. Them leaving the farm was a good stopping point but it meant the wedding night got shifted into book 2.
I’m sure that’s correct, but it was pretty weird to start the book at the dentist’s office and then stumble upon that right away. :)
Ha ha. I can imagine.
I don’t know if it’s a spoiler or not to note that LMB toned down the sexytimes considerably in books 3 and 4. I think a certain segment of her readership was uncomfortable with the idea that they were reading a romance novel.
Hrrrrm. I’m not quite sure what I think of her sex scenes. They’re not bad. But they’re not good. They’re not entirely uninteresting, but they’re not very interesting. And I don’t think it’s in the writing or the execution of it. I think it comes down to the characters.
Maybe I’m just not into the older, worldier man teaching the young, naive girl dynamic. And yea, Dag’s not an oversexed, dominant, predatory vampire. And Fawn’s got brains and common sense. And at least they’re not fated to be together. So it’s far from as bad as it could be.
So the scenes still feel like they’re missing something that could make them better. But it may not be something fixable for me without changing one or both characters.