romance – Page 4 – Triple Take

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 creatureâ€”at dire costâ€”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 Fawnâ€™s birth (thereâ€™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 thereâ€™s a lot that Fawn doesnâ€™t know and is curious about, it sometimes seems like youâ€™ve got the â€œwise man teaching ignorant girlâ€ dynamic going on, but itâ€™s not really pervasive. Thereâ€™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 itâ€™s incredibly easy to visualize. The best example is probably the part where Dag has found the maliceâ€™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 Fawnâ€™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 thereâ€™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, Iâ€™m willing to stick around and see how the story develops, but if this was the first installment of a story by anyone else, Iâ€™m not sure Iâ€™d be too keen to continue with it.

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

The Sharing Knife: Legacy (Lois McMaster Bujold)

The Plot
Fawn and Dag, newly married, head off to break the disturbing news to Dag’s Lakewalker kinfolk. The reaction is almost universally poor, and Dag’s immediately family take it especially badly. But the pair attempt to settle in and find their place anyway. Unfortunately, news from a neighboring area calls Dag away to fight […]

The Plot
Fawn and Dag, newly married, head off to break the disturbing news to Dag’s Lakewalker kinfolk. The reaction is almost universally poor, and Dag’s immediately family take it especially badly. But the pair attempt to settle in and find their place anyway. Unfortunately, news from a neighboring area calls Dag away to fight a surprisingly strong malice, and Fawn is left at camp for a time to fend for herself. The pair are finally reunited after several harrowing experiences that still don’t convince the Lakewalkers of Fawn’s worth as a person. In the end, Dag and Fawn break ties with the camp and set off on their own.

My Thoughts
In the first book, very little about the Lakewalker home life is revealed to the reader, and the reader is left to draw conclusions based on inference and a tiny bit of actual information. It’s very easy to fall into the assumption, which I freely admit doing, that because the Lakewalkers presented such a contrast to the farmers in how they viewed and treated women, their culture must be more liberal and open. We discover pretty quickly in Legacy that such is not the case. In fact, the Lakewalkers are mostly a bunch of dicks.

Dag begins the book immediately on the defensive, much to Fawn’s dismay. She feels that his family (and culture in general) can’t really be that bad, and that she’ll have a shot at winning them over in the way he did most of her family. Resulting events suggest that he was correct, though it’s not clear to me that the outcome was completely inevitable. All the same, it was not very evitable and the sequence of events did not strain my view of the characters or their world very much.

We spend the first third of the book dealing with Fawn and Dag’s arrival at Hickory Lake camp and the assorted reactions of the Lakewalkers to their marriage. It’s here that the arrogance and calcification of the Lakewalker world view becomes clear. We learn more about the background of the world, which is apparently post-apocalyptic: at some point in the distant, distant past, a group of genetically enhanced “Lords” caused a disaster from which sprang the seeds that grow into malices. This disaster also drastically reduced the human population and led to the loss of most advanced technology and historical records from that time. The Lakewalkers, with their abilities to see and manipulate ground, feel that they are the descendants of these enhanced beings, and spend a great deal of time patting themselves on the back over their decision not to rule over the inferior farmers.

It soon becomes clear to the reader, however, that the Lakewalkers, in separating themselves from the farmers, have completely lost touch with the reality of the world and are falling behind technologically. Though Dag attempts to cast the problem in terms of Malice threat — what if the Malice comes up in a farmer city with well-trained craftsmen — it isn’t hard to extrapolate that pretty soon the farmers are going to lose their last thread of patience with the Lakewalkers’ bad attitude and may be fed up enough to attempt to rid themselves of their presence. This, of course, would be a disaster for everyone, but the farmers don’t know it and the Lakewalkers are too full of themselves to pass this information along.

This problem eventually comes to a head when, after several situations where Fawn again and again proves herself as capable and smart as Lakewalkers, Dag’s mother and brother make a last maneuver to try and get her thrown out of the camp and the marriage annulled. Dag has had enough, and realizes that he’s never going to figure out how to solve the problem of Lakewalker/Farmer friction if he stays in camp, so tells everyone off and then declares that he’s getting the hell out. The Lakewalkers are shocked, since their worldview does not permit even the idea that someone would prefer to live other than with their awesomeness.

After this scene, it became clear to me that the whole book had been working up to this point, and that what I thought was the goal — for Fawn and Dag to work within the Lakewalkers to effect change — was never the point at all. Dag needed to see that a single pair within the camp was simply not enough pressure to dislodge their very entrenched attitudes. So they leave in search of more leverage, though I couldn’t figure at that point what it might be.

Throughout the book an additional sub plot continues with Dag’s exploration of grounds, healing, and the relationship between what malicies do and what the Lakewalkers do. It seems mostly incidental here in spite of Dag’s vague angst about it all, but will probably be important later.

In Short
I didn’t really enjoy this book as much as the first one. The romance seemed to take a backseat to the description of Lakewalker society and attitudes. While all of the information is useful and important to the continuing series plot, it just wasn’t as interesting to me as the character development of Fawn and Dag as individuals and more importantly the development of them as a couple. I find them far more compelling when they’re together and operating as a team than when they are apart, and it felt like they spent a great deal of this book divided. On the other hand, a weak Bujold is still much better than most other books, and this one was necessary in many ways to further the actual plot now that the romance was solidly established.

J’s Take on Bujold’s The Sharing Knife #2: Legacy

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 […]

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.

J’s Take on Bujold’s The Sharing Knife #1: Beguilement

There are moderate spoilers within. Read at your peril.
I generally like Bujold’s books, the Vorkosigan ones in particular of course, so it was inevitable I’d read this series. She’s also an author I will definitely buy the books of, despite the ready availability at the library. Annoyingly, Borders had book 1 available, but not book […]

There are moderate spoilers within. Read at your peril.

I generally like Bujold’s books, the Vorkosigan ones in particular of course, so it was inevitable I’d read this series. She’s also an author I will definitely buy the books of, despite the ready availability at the library. Annoyingly, Borders had book 1 available, but not book 2. So I don’t yet have that in my hand. I did borrow 3 and 4 from the library. The fourth because it’s just out in hardcover, the third because I happened to see it. Hey, it boosts the circulation stats. I do intend to buy them all at some point.

But enough about that, how about about the book itself? The premise is, simply: Farmer girl gets into a bit a trouble, runs away, comes across a patrol of demon-hunters. Love ensues.

The story started off all right, from the girl’s point of view, though it was hard to know how old she was, which was annoying. I wouldn’t have cared, except she seemed to mind. But then we jump to the patrollers and there was a boring scene about tracking down a demony thing and arrows and whatnot. Action scenes don’t do it for me unless I already have something invested. I did not at that point. I didn’t care to learn how neat it was that a one-armed man could fire a bow. Did I mention “snooze”? No, I didn’t. Snoozzzzze.

Then we get to the eye-rolling bit, as one-armed heroic patroller dude saves farmer girl from a rape. Gee, thanks. That’s original. And after that, it’s sort of downhill, or at least not uphill. She’s all innocent and naive and near-as-to-virginal-as-to-not-matter-except-we-get-a-gory-miscarriage. So the kindly, older, angst-ridden, widowed, worldwise, awesome lover patroller gets to show her what sex is like and junk.

But! Once the inevitable sex scene is eye-rollingly over, the story does get better. Now the farmer girl’s smartened up a bit, I can see it as a more even relationship. Though when he breaks his other arm, to give her an excuse to be more dominant…

Then we get some supposedly comical scenes that I could picture very well. But that wasn’t a good thing, because I was picturing bad comedy movies. Someone hoisted out the door and thrown in the dirt with his hindquarters in the air just being one example. The other examples are in pretty much the climax of this part of the story (as this novel is only part of a story), and I’ve already spoiled enough. But they’re even sillier.

And yea, well.. if it wasn’t Bujold, I would probably stop at this point. But I did recall that the first book or two of the Vorkosigan Saga weren’t my cup of tea really either. So maybe she’s just warming up. Maybe they’ll have kids and their kids will be interesting?

Well, one can hope.

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