Well, and YHB has finally gotten around to writing up the fourth book in the Sharing Knife series. Y’all may possibly remember that I opened a can of proverbial with a post on Mohanraj, Rosenbaum, Bujold in which I, er, cast aspersions? defended? well, talked about the series. It was the fourth book in the series (Horizon) that I was reading during this whole discussion, but the point I was making (or rather attempting to make) was about the series as a whole, rather than solely about this book. In fact, the trip down the pseudo-Mississippi to pseudo-N’Awleans was more (retroactively) startling in its lack of language and ethnic diversity than the return trip overland in Book 4.
And, as I said there, I enjoyed the series in spite of its flaws, and I enjoyed this book in spite of its flaws. Had it not been for the discussion of race, I would have said that this book’s main flaw was, like the last one, being structured as three hundred pages of set-up followed by a hundred pages of action. I still think that is in some sense the main flaw, although not the most serious flaw, in the sense that the only real result of that structural flaw is that the bulk of the book lacks the urgency that conflict would provide, while the result of the ethno-racial-linguistic homogeneity is a (small but real) addition to the problems of ethnic and racial minorities in our culture. On the other hand, that addition really is very small, just an incremental straw on the camel’s proverbial, whilst the three hundred pages took me hours to read.
And, you know, I mostly enjoyed reading those three hundred pages, too. There’s nothing like good, comfortable, smooth writing to make that go down easy.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.