The Sharing Knife: Legacy by Lois McMaster Bujold: B+

From the front flap:
Fawn Bluefield, the clever young farmer girl, and Dag Redwing Hickory, the seasoned Lakewalker soldier-sorcerer, have been married all of two hours when they depart her family’s farm for Dag’s home at Hickory Lake Camp. Alas, their unlikely marriage is met with prejudice and suspicion, setting many in the camp against them. […]

From the front flap:
Fawn Bluefield, the clever young farmer girl, and Dag Redwing Hickory, the seasoned Lakewalker soldier-sorcerer, have been married all of two hours when they depart her family’s farm for Dag’s home at Hickory Lake Camp. Alas, their unlikely marriage is met with prejudice and suspicion, setting many in the camp against them. A faction of the camp even goes so far as to threaten permanent exile for Dag.

Before their fate as a couple is decided, however, Dag is called away by an unexpected malice attack on a neighboring hinterland threatening Lakewalkers and farmers both. What his patrol discovers there will not only change Dag and hew new bride, but will call into question the uneasy relationship between their peoples—and may even offer a glimmer of hope for a less divided future.

Review:
When I reviewed the first installment in The Sharing Knife series, Beguilement, I lamented its lack of a more traditional fantasy novel plot. It’s not that it wasn’t good; it just wasn’t what I expected. This second volume, Legacy, definitely fulfills more of that traditional fantasy role while dealing with the aftermath of Dag and Fawn’s marriage in interesting ways.

Since the two books were originally conceived of as one, this one picks up two hours later, with the newly married Dag and Fawn on their way to Hickory Lake, the Lakewalker camp where Dag’s family resides. When they arrive, all sorts of questions are answered, though it’s the new ones that crop up that prove the more interesting.

Bujold again excels at writing in such a way that it is incredibly easy to visualize the scene and her worldbuilding is unique and thorough. I enjoyed all the details of life at Hickory Lake, including the way the camp is laid out, the clever patrol-tracking system in place in the commander’s cabin, further information on sharing knives and the origin of malices, and the process for settling camp grievances. I also thought it was neat that, like Fawn’s family back in West Blue, Dag’s family is still unable to really see him for his own worth.

More compelling than this, however, is the fact that the novel deals with the question of what Dag and Fawn ought to do now that they are married. What will become of Fawn when Dag goes out on patrol? What if he doesn’t come back; can he trust the camp to provide for her? Will she ever be accepted, even if she displays her cleverness and desire to be useful over and over again? Indeed, it’s Fawn who makes the intuitive leap later in the novel that saves the lives of ten people, yet others almost immediately seek to award credit to Dag somehow. Even those who like her, like the camp’s medicine maker, Hoharie, stop short of recommending a permanent place for her in camp life.

On the more fantasy side of things, Dag is contending with his “ghost hand,” ground that originally belonged to his left hand, now missing, which can be called upon in times of urgency to perform unexpected feats of magic. (Or, as shown in the too-detailed marital consummation scene early in the book, for sexy purposes. At least the rest of such encounters are less explicit.) When a jaunt as captain, commanding several patrols as they strive to exterminate a highly-advanced malice, ends with him using this hand in a couple of new ways, Dag begins to realize that perhaps his life is going to change directions.

What with the way Fawn’s being treated at the camp, the way farmers largely remain ignorant of the malice threat, the threat of banishment arising from his family’s petition to dissolve his and Fawn’s marriage, and the knowledge that maybe he could be something other than a patroller, Dag eventually decides to head out and travel the world with Fawn by his side. Somehow I had absorbed the spoiler that this would eventually happen, but I like that the decision ultimately makes sense.

Overall, I liked Legacy more than Beguilement. I like the lead characters and hope that the small band of supporting Lakewalkers who were on their side in the camp council hearing will be seen again. It looks like Dag and Fawn will be acquiring some traveling companions in the next book, too, which I’m look forward to.

Additional reviews of The Sharing Knife: Legacy can be found at Triple Take.

J’s Take on Flora Segunda by Ysabeau Wilce

The sequel to this book just made the Tiptree honor list, as this book did the year before, so it’s a good time to be reading it.
There’s a lot to like in this book. The female characters are good, and take roles you don’t normally expect to see. They’re in the military, just like the […]

The sequel to this book just made the Tiptree honor list, as this book did the year before, so it’s a good time to be reading it.

There’s a lot to like in this book. The female characters are good, and take roles you don’t normally expect to see. They’re in the military, just like the men and boys are, and one of them is even referred to as, I believe, ‘The Butcher’… or well, it was something bloody and unpleasant. Also, two thumbs up for them being called ‘sir’. I always liked that in Star Trek and was quite mad at Voyager and Janeway for insisting otherwise.

The setting is California.. at first I thought it was a future California and the references to magic was just technology that had been half-forgotten. But then I wasn’t so sure. It may be an alternate, fantastical California. There are Houses, which are not only the families that live in them, but the houses themselves, which have an AI (or a sentient magical demonal being thing) that is also the house and part of the family. Some alien invaders, or maybe they’re not alien, but they’re bird-like creatures, have come in. And there was a war, but they’re sort of in a truce at the moment.

Flora Segunda is the second Flora born into the family, the first one having died. Her father’s got PTSD and is generally loopy. Her mother is a General and is off doing General stuff most of the time. Leaving Flora to take care of the big house by herself. Her sister’s also off in the military. She’s almost 14 and preparing for her Catorcena party where she’ll be officially an adult and can go join the military herself. But she doesn’t want to. She wants to be a ranger. Which are cooler, sort of like spies, and they can use magic, and they’re more independent, I gather.

What’s the plot though? That’s the hard part. I had trouble following the plot. Flora seems to go off randomly in several directions, so that I can’t quite tell what her goal is half the time. She finds the denizen for her house, which has been locked up by her mother. And instead of asking her mother why, she just goes along with the plan of helping him out. Which involves giving him some of her Will. She doesn’t even seem to think twice about that.

So part of the time, she’s trying to help him get stronger and free himself from her mother’s banishment and whatnot. But then part of the time she’s gone off to try to save this Dainty Pirate guy that her mother has captured and sentenced to death. And all her attempts to do that fail spectacularly. But not for any particular reason arising from her actions or the actions of an antagonist. It’s just sort of.. fate, or coincidence. Or at least certainly seems to be. A maleficial deus ex machina if you will.

And in the middle of the muddle that the plot turns into, at least in my head, Flora’s being far too trusting of people. Especially when they’re not even people. She and her sidekick, whose name has already escaped me, meet this random mermaid guy and swallow his story whole without questioning it in the least. Or even questioning him in the least.

Now, yea, okay, they’re only 13, and maybe their lives and thoughts are a muddle. But it’s not enjoyable to try to follow. And I frequently wanted to shake her.

Interesting world and interesting society. And, like I said, some good things in here. I want to know more about these creatures and halfbreeds they’re at war with. I wonder if there’s more in the short stories that preceded this book. Or if there’s more in the sequel. So I’ll read more. But I don’t know that I’d recommend it to other people. Read it if it interests you, but if you’re looking for books to read, I have others I can suggest.

J’s Take on Lois McMaster Bujold’s Sharing Knife #3: Passage

Passage wasn’t quite what I was expecting.. not that I was expecting anything too specific.
This is book three, so you definitely have to have read the first two. Dag and Fawn have left the Lakewalkers and gone off on their own, with a vague plan to bridge the gap between farmers and Lakewalkers and make […]

Passage wasn’t quite what I was expecting.. not that I was expecting anything too specific.

This is book three, so you definitely have to have read the first two. Dag and Fawn have left the Lakewalkers and gone off on their own, with a vague plan to bridge the gap between farmers and Lakewalkers and make the world a better, safer place.

I wasn’t quite sure where Bujold would go with their story, and it’s quite open-ended at the end of the last book. But I did think one possibility was to have them wander around the world, gathering up followers. And they do do that, though not quite in the way I imagined.

What was surprising to me was that this is a river journey story. There’s no clear hint of that from the picture on the cover. You have to look closely to see the river behind them. And I don’t normally look at covers too closely before I read.

The first surprising thing they do is go back to Fawn’s family. It almost feels like the story is backtracking when they do that. But they don’t stay there long. They’re just there long enough to pick up Fawn’s brother, Whit. He’s the first person they acquire. Then they go on to the river and hire a boat. The next surprising turn is that they sit on this boat without going anywhere for a few chapters. Normally you’d think if this is a quest story or a journey story or even any other sort of story, there’d be forward movement in the form of the boat actually going somewhere.

Of course they pick up other people along the way.. most before they even really get started moving the boat. Now, naturally their little band can’t be completely made up of farmers, so Dag manages to acquire some Lakewalkers too. Now, yes, this is entirely without them doing anything consciously to get a gaggle of followers. That’s the best sort of leader, right? Well.. I don’t know about that, but it’s a common idea in some books.

This book reminded me most of Mississippi Jack which is also a river story. Some of the minor plots are even similar. And I do like Mississippi Jack, as I like all of the Jacky Faber stories, so it makes me think favorably of this book as well. Which makes it my favorite of the series thus far.

Dag learns more ‘magic’ and plays around with it and stuff, which is interesting. We have another battle, which is less interesting. All in all, it’s not bad.

Where’s the story going in the next book? Well, I picture their band growing a little bigger, and then they’ll set about changing the world and saving it from the evil malices. Using Dag’s new, special groundsensing skills, and probably beating him up quite a lot in the process. And Fawn will of course be instrumental in it. And some people will die, other than redshirts. And then they’ll live happily ever after.

It’s a shame the last book is hardcover. I tend to have a different reading experience with books if they’re paperback versus hardcover. And hardcover doesn’t usually fare as well.

But, at least, only one more book to go!

The Sharing Knife: Passage (Lois McMaster Bujold)

The Plot
Having given up their attempt at living among the Lakewalkers, Dag and Fawn are at loose ends. Dag decides to fulfill an earlier promise he made to Fawn and show her the ocean. Accordingly, the pair set off. Along the way, they’re joined by new companions, including Fawn’s brother Whit, a young man accidentally […]

The Plot
Having given up their attempt at living among the Lakewalkers, Dag and Fawn are at loose ends. Dag decides to fulfill an earlier promise he made to Fawn and show her the ocean. Accordingly, the pair set off. Along the way, they’re joined by new companions, including Fawn’s brother Whit, a young man accidentally beguiled by Dag, the riverboat captain Berry, and some young Lakewalkers who have decided to run away from home. Dag’s powers continue to increase, and he begins to grow more and more worried over what he might be turning into.

My Thoughts
The first two books were written together as one book and then backedited to split them into two. I believe that is not the case with books 3 and 4, though they were also intended to be two halves of the same story (and together to form a second half of the story started by books 1 and 2). Bujold had given them the working titles of Wide Green World 1 and 2, but for publication they were changed to Sharing Knife 3 and 4, which I think was a wise decision.

We pick up in Passage very shortly after Fawn and Dag have cut ties with Hickory Lake camp. They have headed for the farm belonging to Fawn’s family, and stop there for a little while to figure out just what they’re going to do. Upon arrival they discover that Fawn’s twin brothers, the ones who had caused the most trouble back in book 1, have departed to the frontier to look for land. Fawn’s remaining family (her parents, aunt, two brothers and sister-in-law) are much more accepting of Dag and don’t question too deeply why the pair are out on the road again.

Eventually, Fawn and Dag move on from the farm, feeling refreshed and with at least some goal in mind: to go visit the ocean. They have also picked up Fawn’s brother Whit as a travelling companion for at least part of the way. That it turns out to be more than just part of the way should surprise no one, least of all them, and on the whole they don’t seem particularly shocked. They both acknowledge that there was little to hold Whit back at the farm, since he was not due to inherit and there was no other obvious outlet for his creativity.

Dag, freed from the oversight of Lakewalker superiors, begins experimenting a good deal more with his ground-based powers. He first has a sort of idea that he will heal the rift between farmers and Lakewalkers by allowing farmers to share in some of the medical techniques used by the camps. It doesn’t take him long to realize that this idea requires a good deal more thought than he gave it before starting. We discover that “beguilement”, the title of the first book, is an actual real state which can be caused accidentally (or on purpose). To me, at least, this was not clear before, because Dag’s original explanation was filtered through Fawn’s perception and seemed to be that farmers got obsessed with Lakewalkers because they were so good in bed. It turns out to actually be a bit more serious than this, a real problem needing a solution.

The solution presents itself partway through the book, as Dag comes to understand what it is that causes the beguilement and figures out how to remove it. This is fortunate, because the ‘big bad’ of the book turns out to be not a Malice, but a renegade Lakewalker who has been beguiling people left and right to make a troop of bandits.

This Lakewalker, Crane, is someone who was mentioned in passing before — a Lakewalker who got involved with a farmer woman and ended up thrown out of camp as a result of his support of her. I’m not sure if we’re meant to feel sympathy for him or not; in spite of his involvement with the farmer woman, he doesn’t seem to have much respect for them as a people. This may be born from his anguish at her death and his alienation from society as a whole, but it’s not clear. In any case, he is definitely full of contempt for others by the time we meet him here.

The encounter with Crane is a double-edged sword for Dag. Throughout the whole book Dag has been experimenting more willingly and aggressively with his groundwork: healing people, trying to figure out beguilement, trying to figure out how to replenish his reserves more quickly. But he’s also growing more and more tense as the techniques he seems to be discovering strike him as very similar to the methods Malices use to enslave and destroy others. Dag lashes out at Crane when Fawn is threatened and uses his abilities to paralyse him from the neck down. He fears very much that he has gone too far and is turning into a monster. But to the good, he manages to use Crane’s death to acquire a new Sharing Knife, something he has been feeling a lack of for the whole course of the book. And in so acquiring, he is able to use the activity as a teaching exercise for the large group of Farmers who assisted in breaking up the bandit group.

One negative aspect to the focus on Dag’s exploration of groundwork was that I felt Fawn was relegated here to a less prominent role. She was still around, being supportive and clever, but on the whole I felt the spotlight was mostly shining on Dag. On the other hand there were only a few points in the book where they were divided up, and then only for a few hours at a time. The Malices didn’t make any appearances on camera at all, which made for a nice change.

Aside from the main thread of plot, we have several subplots introduced here, along with some new characters. Berry Clearcreek is the captain of the boat in which our protagonists head down the river. She’s a young woman about Fawn’s age, and relieves her of the responsibility of being the only girl in the party. Berry is on a mission to try and find out what happened to her father, brother and fiance, who never returned from their trip downriver the year prior. Unfortunately for her, it turns out that her relatives are dead and her fiance has joined Crane’s bandits.

The group is also joined by Remo and Barr, two young Lakewalker patrollers who have gotten in big trouble with their families and their camp. Both exemplify the problem Dag is attempting to solve: they are arrogant and look down on farmers as inferiors. Over time, they begin to realize farmers aren’t as stupid as they thought. The question of what they plan to do next is still unresolved at the end of this book.

In Short
This one was by far my favorite of the whole series. Not only did Fawn and Dag manage to spend almost the entire book together, but what battle scene there was was quite brief and didn’t involve a malice at all. As an added bonus, we got another interesting female character, and some friends for Fawn. Dag’s angsting about his powers was a little tiresome, but his concerns were legitimate enough, and didn’t get in the way of the story (ie, he didn’t go making some dumbass speeches about not using his powers and then being forced to go back on his word only after tragedy had ensued.) We started to get a few inklings of how the central background plot point might eventually be resolved, but at the end of this book it still seems an enormous and unwieldy task for our small band of heroes.

The Sharing Knife: Beguilement by Lois McMaster Bujold: B

From the front flap:
Young Fawn Bluefield has fled her family’s farm hoping to find work in the city of Glassforge. Uncertain about her future and the troubles she carries, Fawn stops for a drink of water at a roadside inn, where she counters a patrol of Lakewalkers, enigmatic soldier-sorcerers from the woodland culture to the […]

From the front flap:
Young Fawn Bluefield has fled her family’s farm hoping to find work in the city of Glassforge. Uncertain about her future and the troubles she carries, Fawn stops for a drink of water at a roadside inn, where she counters a patrol of Lakewalkers, enigmatic soldier-sorcerers from the woodland culture to the north. Though Fawn has heard stories about the Lakewalkers, she is unaware that they are engaged in a perilous campaign against inhuman and immortal magical entities known as “malices,” creatures that suck the life out of all they encounter, and turn men and animals into their minions.

Dag is an older Lakewalker patroller who carries his past sorrows as heavily as his present responsibilities. When Fawn is kidnapped by the malice Dag’s patrol is tracking, Dag races to rescue her. But in the ensuing struggle, it is not Dag but Fawn who kills the creature—at dire cost—and an uncanny accident befalls Dag’s sharing knife, which unexpectedly binds their two fates together.

Review:
For all that this book took me something like six weeks to finish, I find that I don’t actually have all that much to say about it. The description quoted above admirably sums up the beginning of the novel, in which Dag rescues Fawn from some bandits, her pregnant status provokes a nasty creature to kidnap her back again, and they end up taking down a “malice” together. I can’t help but think that the reason the blurb doesn’t touch on any plot after this point is that there really isn’t much of one.

Beguilement is really more of a romance than a fantasy novel, though Bujold has still done a good job with the worldbuilding, working in details on the differences between Fawn’s and Dag’s cultures throughout the novel. But after the malice is defeated, there isn’t much going on except them riding on horses, staying in inns, developing fancies for one another, finally consummating their relationship, doing it many more times and often outdoors in the company of bugs, encountering Fawn’s not-so-supportive family, convincing them to support a marriage, and getting hitched. I guess if I lay it out like that it looks like a lot happened, but really, how much of that sounds like a fantasy novel?

The fact that the characters are both likable makes up for some of the plotlessness, at least. Fawn has had a very sheltered upbringing where her thirst for knowledge was not encouraged. Now, with support for her quick wits, she proves herself to be pretty clever and resourceful. Dag is a very experienced patroller who was widowed before Fawn’s birth (there’s quite a big age difference between them) and has been fiercely solitary ever since, so opening himself up to her is a pretty unique experience for him. Because there’s a lot that Fawn doesn’t know and is curious about, it sometimes seems like you’ve got the “wise man teaching ignorant girl” dynamic going on, but it’s not really pervasive. There’s one scene near the end where Dag praises Fawn for a brilliant leap of logic that comes across as completely admiring and not at all patronizing. It even made me a bit sniffly after seeing how little her family appreciates her.

Too, Bujold simply writes really well. Without being overly wordy, she can paint a scene so vividly that it’s incredibly easy to visualize. The best example is probably the part where Dag has found the malice’s lair and is taking in the layout of the area: I swear I could picture it perfectly after only a couple of sentences. And even if the parts with Fawn’s family were rather uncomfortable to read, considering their dismissive treatment of her, they were still entertaining. Probably, enduring all that strife was necessary so as to be as relieved as the main characters when they were finally able to leave it all behind.

While I like Fawn and Dag both together and separately, I do hope that there’s more of a plot to the next book. A typical fantasy series would have an epic quest to wipe out evil, but I sort of doubt Bujold is going to adhere to standard genre tropes. Because I do admire her writing, I’m willing to stick around and see how the story develops, but if this was the first installment of a story by anyone else, I’m not sure I’d be too keen to continue with it.

Additional reviews of The Sharing Knife:Beguilement can be found at Triple Take.