Review: The Sharing Knife - Beguilement
Oct. 15th, 2006 07:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jeriendhalIt's Bujold, just go out and buy the damned thing, okay?
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Oh, all right.
After the wildly uneven Diplomatic Immunity and the murkily plotted and unappealing characters of Hallowed Hunt it's nice to see Lois get back on track for this novel, which is part one of a planned duology (actually the book was split in half for length reasons.)
Bluntly, TSK is a romance novel. On the female end of things we've got Fawn, a young woman on the run from an indifferent family, a not-boyfriend who managed to knock her up, and her own feelings of inadequacy, honed by years of ego-smashing courtesy of said family. Of all of Bujold's heroines, she perhaps closest to a naif we've ever seen, neither hyper-competant nor really special in any way, lacking Cordelia or Ista's experience, Quinn's cleverness, or even Fiametta's minor magical abilities.
On the male end we've got Dag, aRanger Lakewalker, part of a semi-nomadic extended family that is sworn to hunt down Malices, a rather nasty form of beastie that sucks the life out of everything to the point of turning rocks into sand. He's yet another version of Bujold's interpetation of RAH's "competant man", as we've seen before in Aral Vorkosigan and Lupe dy Cazaril, experienced, clever and wounded (in spirit and body, having lost his wife and his left hand in an attack by a Malice's wolf army some years before.)
When the two bump into each other during a Lakewalker hunt of a suspected Malice, they end of saving each other's life a couple of times, and Fawn in particular is drawn into Lakewalker customs when she accidentally primes Dag's "Sharing Knife", the only weapon that can kill a Malice, with the life of her unborn child, which she loses to a miscarraige courtesy of the creature. Recovering from the mutual injuries, they're attracted to each other, with Fawn breaking throuh Dag's carefully maintained distance to companionship while she blossoms under the Lakewalkers' praise for helping defeat the Malice. After falling hopelessly in love with each other (like I said, it's a romance novel), then they have to face the real challenge of dealing with Fawn's family. Lakewalkers hold "Farmers" (anyone not a Lakewalker) in mild contempt, while the farmers view their protecters with suspicion, seeing them as necromancers (untrue, but the method of making a Sharing Knife is nasty enough to make the mistake). For a Lakewalker and a Farmer woman to marry will mean reconciling with Fawn's family, unpleasant as that may turn out to be.
While the plot of this first book is simple, lacking the political complexity of the Vorkosigan books or the deeply thought out religion of Chalion, Lois uses her well-honed world-building ability to create an appealing universe for the characters to inhabit. The Lakewalkers, with a vaguely psionic "Groundsense" ability (sort of a hyped-up empathy), mostly resemble Mercedes Lackey's Heralds, minus the damned white horses (and about 90% of the angst and idiocy). They're not perfect however, and even somewhat limited in their lifestyle compared to the farmers they protect. Fawn's family, once encountered again, proves to be appealing (well most of them) while simultaneously exasperating. If this was a Lackey book they would have probably been shown to irredeemably evil. As it is, they're complicated, neither perfect saints or devils, but mostly just flawed and human, and perhaps too set in their ways to handle a girl who dreams of a life beyond farming.
As for what is beyond farming and being married to a Lakewalker man... Well, we'll have to wait eight months for the next book to find that out. :)
.
.
.
.
Oh, all right.
After the wildly uneven Diplomatic Immunity and the murkily plotted and unappealing characters of Hallowed Hunt it's nice to see Lois get back on track for this novel, which is part one of a planned duology (actually the book was split in half for length reasons.)
Bluntly, TSK is a romance novel. On the female end of things we've got Fawn, a young woman on the run from an indifferent family, a not-boyfriend who managed to knock her up, and her own feelings of inadequacy, honed by years of ego-smashing courtesy of said family. Of all of Bujold's heroines, she perhaps closest to a naif we've ever seen, neither hyper-competant nor really special in any way, lacking Cordelia or Ista's experience, Quinn's cleverness, or even Fiametta's minor magical abilities.
On the male end we've got Dag, a
When the two bump into each other during a Lakewalker hunt of a suspected Malice, they end of saving each other's life a couple of times, and Fawn in particular is drawn into Lakewalker customs when she accidentally primes Dag's "Sharing Knife", the only weapon that can kill a Malice, with the life of her unborn child, which she loses to a miscarraige courtesy of the creature. Recovering from the mutual injuries, they're attracted to each other, with Fawn breaking throuh Dag's carefully maintained distance to companionship while she blossoms under the Lakewalkers' praise for helping defeat the Malice. After falling hopelessly in love with each other (like I said, it's a romance novel), then they have to face the real challenge of dealing with Fawn's family. Lakewalkers hold "Farmers" (anyone not a Lakewalker) in mild contempt, while the farmers view their protecters with suspicion, seeing them as necromancers (untrue, but the method of making a Sharing Knife is nasty enough to make the mistake). For a Lakewalker and a Farmer woman to marry will mean reconciling with Fawn's family, unpleasant as that may turn out to be.
While the plot of this first book is simple, lacking the political complexity of the Vorkosigan books or the deeply thought out religion of Chalion, Lois uses her well-honed world-building ability to create an appealing universe for the characters to inhabit. The Lakewalkers, with a vaguely psionic "Groundsense" ability (sort of a hyped-up empathy), mostly resemble Mercedes Lackey's Heralds, minus the damned white horses (and about 90% of the angst and idiocy). They're not perfect however, and even somewhat limited in their lifestyle compared to the farmers they protect. Fawn's family, once encountered again, proves to be appealing (well most of them) while simultaneously exasperating. If this was a Lackey book they would have probably been shown to irredeemably evil. As it is, they're complicated, neither perfect saints or devils, but mostly just flawed and human, and perhaps too set in their ways to handle a girl who dreams of a life beyond farming.
As for what is beyond farming and being married to a Lakewalker man... Well, we'll have to wait eight months for the next book to find that out. :)
