Local Custom (2000)

Generational prequel. This explains a little bit how the Korval came to have so many half-breed Liaden/Terrans in it. Nothing actually happens in the story at all, other than two people renew their love for each other, but at the same time it remains interesting throughout, and more importantly, explain much of the background to the series.

Anne Davis is the featured hero this time around, she is terran, and a professor of linguisitics looking inot the similarity between terran, liaden and yxtrang languages. For a while she had a liad lover Er Thom Yosgalen, and decided to hvae his child, whom she named Shan. Er Thom learns of this and asks Anne to return to Liad so that the clan may know of a new Yosgalen. This already tells you all you need ot know of the plot, and indeed all the action of the story.

The characters sparkle, the dialog is clever, with the honourbound inflections of Liad carefully marked in contrast to the terran casualness. The carefuly balancing and different interpretations of meaning well worked through, with one exception - at a cruical moment Er Thom suddenly decides to re-interprt what he thought he'd said as how Anne might have heard it. This needed a great deal more build-up because it reads like it was just a thought that crossed his mind, wheras it is a profoundly important change in direction.

Very enjoyable. However it is a bit bizarre that Baen would bundle this in with the first four published works int he series as it otherwise doesn't fit in particularly well. It does work well as a starting point to the series, even if very little happens, but I don't yet know what the sensible continuation would be. ( )

More a soap opera than a space opera, with a domineering mother working to prevent her son from marrying a Terran. Aptly fills in the origins of Shan with his unique hair and skill set. ( )

This is one of my favorite science fiction romances. I have read it more times than I can count. Er Thom yos'Galan, Clan Korval, falls in love with linguistics scholar Anne Davis. But the fact that they are from two very different cultures causes a lot of misunderstanding and pain until they work through a way to their "happily ever after." I love the language, the melodrama, and the story. ( )

This book is my least favorite of the Liaden universe. It's a lot better if l think of it as a romance with Liadens. I truly hate misunderstanding tropes, and this one is plain annoying - a Master Trader and a student of Liaden literature can miss each others' incomprehension quite so thoroughly? Ugh. But viewed as a romance, it's quite good. Very solid characters, fascinating situation(s), great conclusion. Anne's attitude toward having a child is very Delgadan - is that a common culture among scholars, or on scholar planets? And Er Thom's choice(s) of solutions are a great illustration of Liaden thought. I'm amused to watch as he starts to break the Liaden mold and flower into a Korval... ( )

Er Thom has tried to put Anne out of his mind, but he can't. Because he needs to marry for his family, he decides he will see her one last time before submitting himself to duty. He goes to her, only to find that they have a son, a terribly non-standard, non-dutiful, but delightfully bright and active son. Still madly in love, the couple tries to figure out how to do right by each other, leading to misunderstanding after misunderstanding as they attempt to meet in the middle of their two vastly different cultures.

Culture clash is a theme in all of Lee and Miller's Liaden books, but this is one of the strongest examples of it.

This book is a prequel - it was written after the Agent of Change series to explain how Anne and Er Thom got together to create such a unique family. It can be read first but I know a few people who did and they wished they hadn't - it was very disappointing to them that most of the characters they'd invested their interest in were dead before the start of the Agent of Change books. I suggest "Conflict of Honors" as the best starting point because of that.

Favorite details: A university bureaucracy that takes up an entire planet - and I thought the red tape at my Big Ten school was bad . . . Shan as a child - is it bad that I find him just as delightful as a two year old as I do when he's a full grown man?

This is one of the cheaper out of print books of the series (Ace canceled the reprint before they could start making money off of this one). Only about $11 for a used reading copy version of the mass market paperback - and I can't imagine that that copy is any better than mine (hold in there cover! Be a sport and don't fall off! You're so pretty!). A "like new" copy is going to put you back about $18 currently - a great price for a Lee and Miller book! Sad thing is, I'm not kidding - when other books in the series are going for $40 for bad used copies, $18 starts looking reasonable . . . ( )