Tag: romance

J’s Take on Sharing Knife: Horizon by Lois McMaster Bujold

Horizon is the fourth and final book in the Sharing Knife series by Lois McMaster Bujold.
Having reached the bottom of the river, Dag and Fawn go off to see if he can get some training from a Lakewalker healer. Wherein we learn a new term ‘groundsetter’, which I never did quite figure out. It seems […]

Horizon is the fourth and final book in the Sharing Knife series by Lois McMaster Bujold.

Having reached the bottom of the river, Dag and Fawn go off to see if he can get some training from a Lakewalker healer. Wherein we learn a new term ‘groundsetter’, which I never did quite figure out. It seems to be a specialty, somewhat like a surgeon. This guy, Arkady, takes on the unconventional Dag as his apprentice. But when Dag goes off to heal a farmer kid with lockjaw, this Lakewalker camp isn’t too keen on the idea. So Dag leaves, but he acquires Arkady and a patroller chick. And they all head up The Trace, which is basically a land path up the river back north. Naturally, along the way, they acquire more people, Lakewalker and farmer both.

So other than Dag being a little more educated, this is basically the plot of the last book. Heading on up the river instead of down, acquiring people as they go. I was enjoying the trip, but after awhile, I started wondering when the big, bad conflict would come along. So every time they encountered a new person or group or weird thing, I wondered if this was going to be it. Only, mostly it turned out not to be it.

When the big bad does show up, it’s pretty interesting. And everyone gets something to do. And people get hurt. And people do clever things.

Around about this time, I was having real trouble telling people apart. There were so many of them and they all had similar, one or two-syllable names, mostly nature-based. There’s Ash and Owlet and Sage and Berry and on and on. And just from the name, you couldn’t guess at gender. And just from the name, you couldn’t guess if they were Lakewalker or farmer. So I’d be staring at a name, trying to remember… Lakewalker or farmer? Male or female? Whose husband was that again?

The last chapter was an epilogue. An entire chapter of infodump to tell us what people had been up to and where they’ll go now that the story is over. Granted it’s not ‘As you know, Bob..’ because the Bob in this situation doesn’t know. They’re filling each other in on what they’ve missed while being apart. So while it’s effective enough, it’s a little inelegant.

One theme in this book is halfbloods. Some of the people they pick up along the way are half-Lakewalker, half-farmer, and of course Dag and Fawn are concerned how any of their children are going to get along in the world. And the final chapter really draws this out.

Which is kind of a shame, because I’m actually far more interested in the halfbloods.

All in all, a decent end to a decent story. Though nothing about the series really wowed me. If Bujold writes more in this world, I’ll definitely read it. But I won’t be going back to reread these anytime soon. Unlike the Vorkosigan books, which I really do need to go back and reread soon.

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The Sharing Knife: Horizon (Lois McMaster Bujold)

The Plot
After seeing the ocean, Dag and Fawn head for their next destination, a Lakewalker camp rumored to house a Healer who might be able to answer some of Dag’s concerns and questions. Arkady Waterbirch, the Healer, turns out to have quite a lot of answers, and much of Dag’s worry is relieved. […]

The Plot
After seeing the ocean, Dag and Fawn head for their next destination, a Lakewalker camp rumored to house a Healer who might be able to answer some of Dag’s concerns and questions. Arkady Waterbirch, the Healer, turns out to have quite a lot of answers, and much of Dag’s worry is relieved. After some trouble with the southern Lakewalker camp, which, though not quite as cut off as the northern camps, is still not very accepting of change and new ideas, the group (Fawn, Dag, Barr and Arkady) join a farmer wagon train heading north. Along the way Dag continues his ‘apprenticeship’ with Arkady and finally makes some real headway on solving the problem of farmer/Lakewalker relations: he invents a shield that can prevent farmers from being mind-controlled by malices. This is tested during an unexpected malice attack where the farmers save the day.

My Thoughts
After the nice interlude on the river, we’re thrown back into the thick of things back on land. Dag’s anxiety over what happened with Crane has grown to a fever pitch, and he feels as if he may be losing control of himself. It’s just so easy to abuse power, especially when it seems to be for the right reasons. Fawn is worried too, and has been canvassing the local poplulation for the name of the best Lakewalker healer around, someone with enough talent they might be able to help guide Dag.

The group is consistently given the name Arkady Waterbirch, and they travel to the camp where he lives. This provides our first introduction to the Southern Lakewalker clans. The South, as we’re told, has been pretty much cleared of malices, and both the farmers and the Lakewalkers have ceased to view them as an immediate threat. The Lakewalkers especially are finding it difficult to maintain the Spartan lifestyle adopted by the northerners: they have started building houses and permanent buildings and mixing far more freely with the farmers in the area. This slow erosion of their supposedly superior culture is a source of great anxiety to the Lakewalkers themselves, and it seems like most of their reactions are informed by their guilt at succombing to farmer ways (and that, deep down, they probably don’t really want to go back.)

Our band of travellers lodge with Arkady while Dag begins learning to control his new abilities. I was pleased that we didn’t have to deal with Dag’s angsting for very long: he calmed down directly he saw Arkady had the same ability to project ground as he did. We then get a glimpse of what might have been back at Hickory Lake camp, had Hoharie agreed to Dag’s suggestion that Fawn be allowed to be his Healing assistant. Though Dag naively assumes the other Lakewalkers are getting used to Fawn and becoming more accepting of her, it’s pretty clear to the reader (and later made starkly clear to Dag) that the Lakewalkers are only humoring the whim of a skilled Healer they hope to retain. They tolerate her, it’s true, but it’s not enough on her own merit that they would ever consider associating with her without him. And so, in case the reader didn’t agree with his decision to light out on his own, we are shown that it never could have worked out any other way.

The group is soon on the move again, heading north with Arkady in tow, after a disagreement with the camp leaders generates an ultimatum and a bluff which Dag calls. And while the necessity of heading north again is clear (without malices, the need for immediate farmer/Lakewalker cooperation is less pressing and seems to be evolving naturally at its own pace), this second half of the book was much weaker than the first. Dag, Arkady, Barr and Fawn join a farmer wagon train heading north, and we’re suddenly introduced to a whole pile of new characters who are not really very distinctive and who, for me, blend together in a confusing mass. The proliferation of characters only increases when we rejoin the other half of the previous travelling group, Fawn’s brother Whit, his new wife Berry and their assorted entourage. Then still more people arrive: a small band sent out from the southern camp to try and entice Dag’s party back, an ignorant farmer family stuck on the road, and Dag’s niece Sumac and another patroller she was with.

The small army travelling along makes it hard to maintain focus. There is a reason to limit a quest group to under ten people: it’s too hard to remember and keep track of where everyone is. I have read books in the past where characters will disappear for chapters at a time (often missing conversations and actions they should certainly have been involved with) only to suddenly pop up again when the author remembers they were there. Bujold does an admirable job of not forgetting characters, but the effort of keeping track of so many different people and made this whole section less effective than the rest. It felt shallow. There was too much going on, and in a series which has made a point of being introspective and “small” in its focus, I felt like suddenly we were doing something else altogether.

The crazy amount of new characters aside, it’s in this part of the book that Dag finally makes progress at solving the problem he has pinpointed as the largest obstacle to farmer/Lakewalker cooperation: the farmers’ vulnerability to Beguilement by both Lakewalkers and Malices. He had made a small attempt at a shield earlier, but it’s only after his work with Arkady that he is competant to actually create one and make it stick. This is a good and reasonable solution to what was a seemingly intractable problem set up in the prior books, and I was pleased at the resolution.

And now a few random observations:
1. The real villain of this book was the Lakewalker Neeta rather than the malices, and I was once again very very glad not to have the plot become embroiled by some sort of stupid jealousy/misunderstanding business where someone sees something that was really innocent and overreacts. I cannot really recall any instances of this in any of the books in this series, and for that I am grateful.

2. That said, we came precipitously near to a cringe-worthy turn of events toward the end of the book where Dag is restrained by the farmers because they think he’s lost it. It was similar in feel to the scene in Legacy which I also disliked, and that is why I preferred Beguilement and Passage which had none such.

3. And finally, I end with a question: Throughout the series we’ve seen that farmers are generally named after real things: plants, animals and the like. Lakewalker given names are more fanciful and seem to have no particular origin in the real world. So what in the hell is going on with Sumac?

In Short
This was a good conclusion for the series, leaving open the possibility of further adventures but tying up all of the main plotlines in a satisfying way. After the very strong third book, I found some parts of this book a bit of a let down, but it was never bad and there was much to like.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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