This is the third in Bujold’s recent series, and I like it a lot better than either of its predecessors.

For those who came in late, Bujold’s The Sharing Knife series involves a place and time where human society is divided into two groups: the Farmers and the Lakewalkers. The division between the two has its roots in a cataclysm in the remote past, a cataclysm which spawned the blight bogles, creatures of malice which, upon hatching, begin to suck the very life out of the land and creatures around them. The land is ultimately completely and utterly dead, and incapable of supporting life.

Lakewalkers, it seems, are the descendants of those responsible for the cataclysm, and they have the self-imposed responsibility of patrolling the land and slaying blight bogles where ever they find them. This is no easy feat, but they are assisted by their possession of the “ground sense”: they can directly perceive and manipulate the field of life carried by all living things. It is this field, this “ground”, that the blight bogles consume. All of Lakewalker life is organized around this mission.

Farmers, on the other hand, are ordinary folks more or less like us. They live in villages and on farms, they grow, they build, they trade. A very few Farmer folk have the merest touch of ground sense. In general, Farmers have a deep and abiding distrust and fear of Lakewalkers, who are thought to “beguile” young women, among other unsavory habits. For their part, Lakewalkers tend to look down on the Farmers, who they regard as undisciplined louts who simply won’t stop building villages and homes in the areas where blight bogles are likely to hatch, no matter how often they are told of the danger.

Enter Fawn and Dag. Fawn’s a young Farmer woman; Dag’s a veteran Lakewalker patroller. In the first book they are thrown together, and slay a blight bogle, and fall in love (natch). Ultimately they marry, following both Farmer and Lakewalker customs, but Fawn’s people are uncomfortable with Dag, and Dag’s people reject Fawn almost completely. Meanwhile, it’s clear to Dag that the Farmers are going to continue to expand into dangerous territory, and that the only way to keep entire towns from being destroyed by the blight bogles is if Farmers and Lakewalkers learn more of each others ways, and learn to work together. And that’s really the topic of this present volume.

The book has an energy that reminds of Bujold’s first book about Miles Vorkosigan, The Warrior’s Apprentice, in which Miles mounts a tiger and isn’t able to dismount through a considerable series of ever larger adventures. Passage is more gentle, but the story builds in the same way. At the outset, Fawn and Dag set off down the river to the sea, partially as a honeymoon trip, and partially for something to do while they figure out just what they ought to do. And as they go, they collect an odd and unlikely collection of people around them, and begin to learn not only the course they should take but the dangers that lie therein.

The whole series has an odd feel of the early American frontier, and that’s especially pronounced here; the details of life along the river owe a great deal to a number of books (listed in the afterword) written by those who sailed the Mississippi in the days before the steamboat…including one Davy Crockett. I might have to look some of them up, as Bujold’s use of them has piqued my curiosity.

Anyway, Passage is a neat book; and for the first time in this particular series, I’m rather looking forward to the sequel.