Horizon by Lois McMaster Bujold

Horizon by Lois McMaster Bujold

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
At last, I found books that made me really understand the scope and depth of Bujold's talent as an author.

This series did a lot of things right by me. It rejected the standard (tired) fantasy genre tropes right and left to tell a genuinely moving story about a small group of people committed to changing the world. There are no kingdoms. No nobility. No boy or girl with a special destiny or super-secret pedigree of awesomeness. It's not set in a medieval, white European setting. In short, it's a story created and told whole cloth, without any of the dumb, lazy shorthand that other authors rely on to give world-building short shrift. There's magic, but characters work out the particulars of it with actually scientific experiments. It's really quite something, and I was surprised nearly at every turn when Bujold rejected the standard fantasy trope to do something different.

The first book in the series is a romance, but the three novels after are post-consummation, and the characters have objectives and plans to change the world for the better. Book Four doesn't bring us fully to the new world our characters want to create, but like the real world, we see glimmers of hope in the changes they are successful in bringing about.

I can't recommend this enough to people who like the genre.


View all my reviews >>

The Sharing Knife: Passage

Passage by Lois McMaster Bujold

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A friend of my commented that these books felt similar in tone to Firefly, and I have to agree. There's a folksiness to the tone and the dialogue that feels a great deal like the crew of Serenity, and Nathan Fillion would make an excellent Dag.

This book was a fairly seamless continuation of the story from the first two novels. Our protagonists have opted for a sort of self-banishment from the Lakewalker community where they had been living, and they join a riverboat crew, traveling south down a Mississippi-like river so that Fawn can see the sea for the first time. Of course, because it's an adventure story, that's only the beginning of their story, and hijinks ensue from there.

While I didn't enjoy it as much as I liked the first two books, it remains a solid installment in the series. I'm hopeful it's a transitional part of the story, and that the final volume in the series will return to the conflicts still unresolved from the first two books.

As always, Bujold's world building is as solid at just about anyone's, and unlike other novels of hers I have read, she's created two main characters it would be difficult not to like and cheer for.

View all my reviews >>