Bujold is one of our favorite authors. She’s one of the few we regularly buy in hardcover; she’s also one of the few we regularly read aloud. When a new Bujold comes out, Jane and I expect to devote our evenings (after the kids go to bed) to reading the new book. It usually takes a week or so, although we slammed through a A Civil Campaign in a weekend; the kids were much younger, then, so we could devote more time to it. But I could hardly talk when I was done.

So when Bujold’s latest, the first book in a new series, came out, we were thrilled. A few days later, we were less so; it just didn’t work well aloud, and we ended up reading the last half separately.

Be warned; this book is much different than Bujold’s Vorkosigan novels, or even than the more recent Chalion series. What it is, is an out-and-out fantasy romance. There’s an interesting setting, and some neat monsters, but mostly it’s about one of those wrong-side-of-the-tracks star-crossed-lovers sort of relationships. And make no mistake–the emphasis is squarely on the relationship, and on each of the principle’s thoughts and feelings. That’s one reason why it didn’t read aloud well–there was so much introspection that the story dragged terribly. I can’t fault Bujold for that, as it proved to move along nicely when read silently. (The other problem with reading it aloud had to do with the nature of the text. Her prose usually reads aloud beautifully, but with this book my tongue kept tripping. Odd, that.)

Anyway, a little more about the story. In this world there are two kinds of folk: the Farmers who are fairly settled villagers, farmers, and townsfolk, the kind you’ve met in a hundred stories, though these seem to have more of an American than a European flavor, and the Lakewalkers, semi-nomadic tribesman who spend their lives “patrolling” for vicious creatures of death the Farmers call “blight bogles” and the Lakewalkers call “malices”. Dag, a Lakewalker, rescues Fawn, a young Farmer woman, from a malice’s minions and later from the malice itself; though in a nice twist it’s Fawn who slays the malice with the “sharing knife” of the title. The deed links the two in a manner I can’t describe without spoiling the story; suffice it to say that the two are thrown together and ultimately (of course!) fall in love.

This is not entirely a good thing, as the difference between the Farmers and the Lakewalkers goes far beyond culture. As the first book of The Sharing Knife ends, all seems well but it’s clear that Dag and Fawn will have a hard time being accepted in either her world or his.

As I say, it read OK silently, and had some quite good bits in it; but it wasn’t what I was hoping for. Oh, well.