The Sharing Knife, Volume II – Legacy by Lois McMaster Bujold – EOS Books

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed other titles by Lois McMaster Bujold in the past – The Curse of Chalion, and Paladin of Souls, as well as the first installment of The Sharing Knife trilogy, Beguilement. Her books (the ones I’ve read, anyway) initially seem to be designed to appeal to the young female adult sci-fi/fantasy fan, offering tantalizing whiffs of romance, perhaps enhanced by mental telepathy – at last, here is a soulmate to understand my deepest feelings! But they turn out to be much more than a stale cliché, with a great deal more depth and readability than expected. Bujold has the ability to take you inside the heads of characters you didn’t think you were going to be interested in and make you eager to find out what’s going to happen to them, and her descriptions of the energetic and psychic realms are believable and thrilling.

This was the case with The Sharing Knife Volume I, Beguilement. When it showed up in our home a year or so ago, I raced through it, crashed into the back cover, and cursed Bujold for not having written the next installment yet. Entertaining? You bet. Sexy? Uh-huh. Fawn, a pregnant, unwed farmer’s daughter, meets Dag, a Strider-like figure belonging to the Lakewalkers tribe, and against both their best intentions, a forbidden romance develops. Dag’s people have for years secretly guarded the farmers against malices, evil golem-like mud-men who live, grow, and create their own bodies by robbing other creatures of their life-force. They can only be killed with a “sharing knife” fashioned from the thighbone of a dead relative, with the essence of their death embedded in it. Lakewalkers, trained from birth to use their ability to sense and manipulate the living “ground” of people and animals (the etheric life essence that shapes and animates the body) resent the farmers whom their ancestral geas binds them to protect, considering them blind, ignorant, and ungrateful. The farmers, for their part, mistrust the Lakewalkers as thieves and nomads. Neither side talks to the other beyond what is necessary for trade, and intermarriage is unthinkable. Book I explores the interplay between Dag, a strong, self-sufficient older man recently handicapped by the loss of a hand, and Fawn, a much younger woman with the challenge of impending motherhood in exile before her.

Despite expectations, I was disappointed by Legacy. It seems to fall prey to “Volume II Trilogitus” – what happens when you have a good beginning, and you know where you’ve got to get to in Book III, but then nothing really happens in Book II except incidents that are necessary as setups for later climactic resolutions. Frankly, I was bored. It even seemed as if Bujold’s usual easy-to-read narratives and place descriptions suffered from a kind of confusing murkiness.

It’s hard to recommend the first book and not the second, because things are by no means resolved at the end of Volume I. So I’ll have to compromise and simply urge you to read Volume II very quickly. Since that’s the case, it would probably be best to wait another year and read all three volumes at one go…assuming Bujold gets things back in gear for Volume III.

-- Mark Ungar