The Sharing Knife: Beguilement and Legacy by Lois McMaster Bujold

0. I treat these two books as one because that was how they were written: Lois McMaster Bujold wrote them as one story, then split them for size and publishing reasons. And it’s obvious in the reading: the first ends with the paramours riding away from their wedding, towards Dag’s family, with no sense of things being tied up—except with Fawn’s family. The second ends with almost everything tied up except for three questions. Also, the writing is indistinguishable between the two. Therefore, one set of notes. Well, as it turns out, only one note.

1. I consistently approach books and films with as much of a blank slate as possible—watch no trailers, never read the back of the book, look at no reviews. I appreciate surprise and exploration above many things in life, and I find going into books blind more informative than taking pre-conceptions with me. This novel starts out as fantasy, building a complex and engaging world about ancient evils that periodically awaken to steal the life-force of things around them, growing stronger and stronger until killed by a magic knife that has captured the death of a human. This life force is called ground and certain people can sense it like gravity, or hearing. McMaster Bujold does a brilliant job introducing the reader to this concept simply, by spreading the explanation out over a couple of chapters.
—She begins by building characters: initially Fawn Bluefield, who is a Farmer, a term for those who cannot sense ground. Beginning with what is familiar to the reader—Fawn is like us. This helps the fantastic elements find their place in the reader’s mind by having something pre-existing to relate them to. This reference point and her questioning persona help build the world through dialogue. I find it works well.
—Then she brings in the fantastic elements by introducing the other main character, Dag Redwing. He is a Lakewalker, somebody who can sense ground, and a patroller who patrols for malices—those ancient evils periodically waking up. He and his patrol encounter evidence of a malice’s slaves and start hunting the malice, showing plenty of glimpses of ground-sense in action, but no real strong explanation—whetting the reader’s tongue.
—Then Fawn gets captured by some of those slaves and Dag ends up rescuing her. Their time together allows her questioning to get explanations out of Dag in dialogue, telling the reader more than they could infer from the actions already shown. This is where the heavy-lifting of the fantastic elements of the world-building occur. And it’s an effective tactic, using dialogue to tell after actions have shown.
—Then together they kill the malice and the story would typically end here with the heroic deed done. But McMaster Bujold continues writing, talking a lot about what comes after the heroic deed. And I am terribly interested, hoping that she explains the world more fully in what is essentially the paperwork and party after the heroes act heroically.
—But what comes out of left field is the sex. There is a romance set up already, but this is real bodice-buster stuff using words like "stroking". The rest of the novel is a fantasy quest tale with one more malice kill tied into a lot of romance and sex. Having set up such an interesting and deep world—with its own mythology, customs, and history—McMaster Bujold does give the reader more of that world, but it is also a romance novel with explicit sex scenes. The novel reads eighty five percent like a great fantasy novel, and fifteen percent like a romance novel.
—If I had known it was a mashup of romance and fantasy, I would have been waiting for the romance and felt the other shoe drop at its arriving. Not knowing, I was surprised, and that's the novel not standing on its own. Other than Jane Austen, I haven’t read any romance, but I don’t really enjoy the romance here. How it compares to most other romance I don't know, but it’s not as enjoyable to me as Austen. The way the opening was written, I didn’t expect the romance and wasn’t looking for it. Therefore, it felt like a short story—a really good short story ending after the malice kill—that she then decided to tack a novel onto. It felt disjointed: after the malice kill, she has to reintroduce the reader to the second part, which takes up the rest of these two books, which deals with the romance and the families of the two paramours. I don’t find this restart to be smoothly accomplished: she paid so much attention to world building in the first part, that the second part switches tracks too awkwardly. This is my main complaint with the novel: not that it’s poor romance, but that it starts out as fantasy-adventure, dips into post-adventure fantasy, then becomes romance-fantasy. I love Pixar films because they set up the premise right at the start—toys have their own lives when we’re out of the room—and if you buy that premise, everything else follows logically. This book sets up a premise, stretches it into an examination of what happens after the heroic act, then switches premises to romance. Like Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, I found it blundering and discongruous. The rest of the novel, at least the eighty-five percent that adheres to the original premise, is good fantasy. That fifteen percent is always ill-fitting though.

2. And that’s my main take-away from this novel. She set up the world and story so well, then added other things in too late that didn’t inform or add anything to the characters or novel other than fan service sex scenes. If that’s what somebody wants, this is the novel for them. I mean, I finished reading it. I will certainly read more by McMaster Bujold because I enjoyed that eighty-five percent so much. But I wont be reading more in this series because it’s split down the middle and can’t decide what it wants to be: there’s not enough romance to be a romance novel, and too much romance to be a fantasy novel.