Legacy (The Sharing Knife, Book 2)

A seamless continuation of the first volume of The Sharing Knife, Book 2 [Legacy] focuses on the rejection of Fawn by her new in-laws. The rejection foregrounds the cultural divisions between the Lakewalkers, with their special abilities, and the Farmers, meaning the rest of humanity. Bridging the chasm between the two cultures develops as the goal for the remaining volumes in the series. Bujold's proficiency with an abundance of characters, settings, and narrative coils in this saga bodes well for its further development.

While book 1 was more fun, book 2 is essential to the story - and book 3 is very fine indeed. Don't skip it! The series is wonderful.

This is part two of the romance fantasy started in Beguilement. In that book, Fawn and Dag met, became entangled by a sharing knife, fell in love and eventually won the acceptance of and the consent of Fawn's farmer family. Now Dag takes his new wife home to meet his mother. Things do not go well. Lakewalker society and culture is very rigid about not marrying Outsiders. Fawn may not have magic in her blood, but her courage, common sense and innovative thinking show how she has blossomed under Dag's encouragement. This reads like an impassioned family drama. It's not the space opera of the Vorkosigan series or the grand spiritual quests of the Chalion books. It demonstrates the incredible reach of Lois McMaster Bujold, who writes literature disguised as genre fiction. Highly recommended.

I find myself unable to quarrel with Bujold's decisions on how many books her story will take to tell. I find the length and the contents of all of them perfect. I don't really read Bujold for the plots, although they are fiendishly suspensful, or the landscapes, which are so well drawn you can feel as well as see them. Instead, I experience any given Bujold novel as a whole, complete and sufficient, and indivisible into the standard parts, although the parts are present and moving with great precision. It's the characters who compel my attention--the imaginary physical, social, and political worlds they inhabit flow naturally from the circumstances Bujold has imagined for them. In The Sharing Knife, we are given a world in which a man can make fire flies dance for his beloved after they have both killed a monster who blights every form of life it can reach, and I find both scenes believable. There is a post-apocalyptic feel about these novels. The Malices who threaten the fragile divided society portrayed in these books were once lords of the earth, and are reduced to mindless destruction as their only path to rebirth. The Lakewalkers spend their lives hunting malices to protect the farmers whom the Lakewalkers also condescend to. Both the Lakewalkers and the farmers have their own technologies and strong social structures, but they exist in a tenuous state of equilibrium, and considerable misunderstanding of each other. The Sharing Knife brings two strong individuals from each society together, and uses their union to test both social structures, as well as the individuals, fiercely. The story of Dag Redwing Hickory and Faun Bluefield is full of what I suspect is the best kind of adventure: discovery. Dag and Faun learn much about themselves, each other, their families, and the greater societies they represent in the course of these two novels. And at the end of Legacy, they are perfectly positioned to learn more, to explore more, and to begin the work of reconciliation that both societies need. I can imagine even greater works in the future of both characters, although I would prefer that Bujold imagined more of this story for me. And when I write prose like the paragraph above, I feel I've constructed the answer to a study question for a great book. I hate study questions. The power of novels is not in the precise generalizations you can reduce them to, but in the particular moments of life your imagination experiences when you read them. The power of Bujold is in the way she finds for Faun Bluefield to make a good marriage string, and the terror Faun must endure to save Dag's life, and in Dag's constant appreciation of Faun's irrepressible self, and how he releases buried powers in himself to put shattered glass together again. That's why Bujold is a very superior novelist--she makes you think about very important things while suffering and triumphing with the most human of beings. Bujold teaches lessons which don't s

[This book is not a stand-alone novel. It is part two of a two-part work, and can not be read by itself. In this review, I will discuss "The Sharing Knife" as a whole.] The Sharing Knife is a dramatic change of pace for Lois Bujold. She became known for her series of science fiction stories centering on the character of Miles Vorkosigan. Then she tried her hand at fantasy works in medieval settings (The Spirit Ring, Curse Of Chalion, etc.). But in each case, the stories featured extremely well-drawn and fascinating characters experiencing and resolving a plot crisis. What's different in this work is the "plot crisis" element. It really doesn't exist in the same way as her other books. Instead, we are dropped into a situation that is something of a stalemate between the forces of chaos, the forces of order, and the forces of growth. The chaos is represented by "malices", creatures of magic that literally erupt from the ground to suck the life force from the world. The order is supplied by the Lakewalkers, descendants of the mage-lords who created the malice plague in the first place. And the growth is supplied by the Farmers, ordinary people who live in uneasy symbiosis with the Lakewalkers. The Farmers can not protect themselves from the malices, but the Lakewalkers rely on the Farmers for tools and goods that can not be produced in nomadic camps. Into this three-part dynamic, Bujold drops a love affair between a burnt-out Lakewalker patroller and a young Farmer girl who is too bright and restless to really fit into her society. The two accidentally join together to kill a malice and end up falling in love. The first book details the initial relationship, the reaction to it from Farmer society, and the marriage between Fawn and Dag. This second book starts up immediately after, with Fawn and Dag attempting to find some acceptance in Lakewalker society. In a previous Bujold story, this would have resulted in some sort of shared triumph that resolved the basic crisis of the plot. But in this book, the shared triumph does resolve something on a personal level for Fawn and Dag, but it very much does not bring about a plot resolution. Unlike Miles Vorkosigan, they are able to realize that they can not change the world by force of will alone, or even by the righteousness of their cause. The situation they are in is unsolvable by its very nature. And so, Bujold instead crafts a story that is more pure romance than any of her other works. Instead of resolving the plot crisis, she is able to just have her characters realize that they must look after their own lives on their own terms. They can't change the Farmers or the Lakewalkers, and they can't solve the malices. But they can choose to be true to their own love and honor. And who knows? Since business as usual isn't really working, maybe their choice will turn out to save the world some other day.