The third installment to a great story. The quality of the writing continues. The fantasy world is expanding and more insights are explained. If you liked for the first two this is more of the same. Looking forward to part 4. ( )

Again, it was better when I read it the second time, after I'd read Horizon. Dag's fumbling badly throughout, and seriously confused (and scared) about his new abilities. And the ending is somewhat arbitrary - well, they did start out saying they were going to the sea and that's where it ended. But they're already planning the next thing - stopping at that point is mostly because it wouldn't all fit in one book! Dag uses his abilities a lot, in settings varying from controlled experiments to save-a-life desperate. His choice of action in the latter was interesting, too - paralysis rather than death. Hmmm, they'd found the knife by then - but a lot of people don't share - I don't know. Odd, is all. And - it being a Bujold - there are lots of lovely lines, especially people working past limits. Fun. And better than Legacy - they feel better together, not so dogged. ( )

This was a suprisingly "quiet" entry into the series. Most of the book was actually about beauty or joy, with the central conflict stirring underneath and resolved very quickly at the end. Yet it was very satisfying. More about people than action, my interest never flagged. Interesting to see the direction the series is going in as well. ( )

http://lonelymountain.net/books/apr09... ( )

(Amy) So, as I said in my review of the previous book in this series, this book is said to mark a turning point in the story - away from the romantic plotline, and settling more solidly into the speculative one. Well, having now read it, I suppose I don't entirely disagree - Dag and Fawn are boring old married people now, so romance readers wouldn't care about them. It still reads like a romance in the less restrictive sense of the word, though. Which is not a complaint, I just find it interesting - a book that is, reportedly, SFnal enough to put romance readers off is still romantic enough to feel more like a romance than like anything else, at least to this SF reader.

Which is not to say that the speculative elements are absent or unsatisfying. The Lakewalker abilities, as being discovered and expanded by Dag, our Designated Omnicompetent Protagonist, are adequately intriguing, and malices (Sirs, Madams, and Things Not Appearing In This Book though they may be) are still creepy as anything, and the Worldchanging Quest they have set out upon is near to epic in its scope. I have a hard time imagining how one would support a claim that it doesn't belong in the SF section.

As for the other protagonist, Fawn, she's a little irritating - I might have been a little more interested in this whole thing if it had been a Lakewalker woman and her farmer husband, rather than this way around. But I suppose someone does indeed have to cook dinner, and neither patrollers (of either gender) nor farmer men are particularly known for their cooking, in this world. Anyway, I suspect she has A Role Yet To Play, in the fourth and final book, in the fashion of fantasy worlds the genre 'round in which one comes into one's own with a bang, and usually just in the nick of time. We shall see if I am right about this.

I did quite enjoy this third volume, though. I don't know if it's the effect abovementioned or if the world and the protagonists are just growing on me, but whatever it was, I was hooked the whole way through this one, and am looking forward to the fourth.
( http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/ze... ) ( )