The Sharing Knife: Legacy by Lois McMaster Bujold

I love Lois McMaster Bujold. Just love her books, the complexity and the particular knack she has for writing a third act that pushes beyond what most authors would have taken for an end point, to see the larger repercussions. The Vorkosigan books are very dear to my heart, and while I've only read The Curse of Chalion from her main fantasy series, I loved that too. So when I saw this at the library book sale last year, I had to snap it up, even though it was second in a series, and there was no sign of the first book on the SF/F table.

More so than many of her other books, though, this was a difficult entry into the series. With the Vorkosigan books, I have picked up ones at different points in the series, and not had too difficult a time knowing where I was and what was going on, at least in broad strokes. But in this book, there's a lot of underlying assumptions that I still don't entirely get, and that made it harder to love the story the way I wanted to. I still ended up liking it, but it definitely does not feel as good as other books by Bujold I have read.

Also, I really should stop reading books from midway through series.

I say that, but it's unlikely to happen.

As we start this book, a couple has just been married, and they're obviously from different worlds - she's a farming woman, he's a much older...uh, necromancer? Kinda? Patroller who kills abominations that spring up with the help of knives into which souls have been bound, anyway. Souls given voluntarily, I should add.

I am led to believe that this relationship was regarded with suspicion by Fawn's folk, but that they eventually, if grudgingly accepted it. That is nothing to the suspicion they are under as they return to the...Lakewalker? Is that the name? camp, where the main male character, Dag's, mother throws a fit, him out of the house, and everyone tells him just to send his farmer sidepiece back to her family, and that farmers can't even really marry - although Fawn and Dag are, through a magical binding that she shouldn't know how to do.

The book bounces between Fawn at the camp, and Dag as he's sent away to take care of one of the magical abominations, which is innovating in ways that are very worrisome to Lakewalkers and farmers alike. Fawn follows, eventually, and yet again is able to do things no one else thinks to do because she's not steeped in ways things "should" be done. But they come back to camp with suspicion still around them.

This is fine, as fantasies go. The people are complicated, and Bujold finds interesting answers, as she always does. It's just not as deep or as interesting as some of her other books, so while I didn't mind reading it, I'm not itching for the next one, as I usually am after finishing one of her works.