Legacy (LM Bujold)
Aug. 6th, 2007 09:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnMy homework for last weekend was reading Legacy. (Next weekend it will be to start looking up all these fabulous book recs I keep getting, yay, thanks!) I... didn't hate it. Probably from the Magic of Low Expectations-- I knew not to expect much, and, well, I wasn't disappointed.
It is a romance book. Fortunately, I was warned multiple times of this in advance. And seeing as how a) romance as a genre kind of bores me, and b) Bujold doing romance presses none of my adoration buttons and many of my rant buttons (more on this in a sec), well, there was a limit to much I'd like it, and I knew that going in.
I see (and I saw dimly after the first book) what Bujold is trying to do-- because she is a Real Writer, she can't stay in stasis doing the same thing forever; she needs to experiment. And I'm glad she does, because what she did in Chalion she could never have done on Barrayar, and in that case her experimentation was a grand success. However, her experiment with romance... well, now you've done the experiment, and now I hope you go on to experiment with something else. Please. Because romance is simply not Bujold's strength, though she may believe it is from the success of ACC. Although I loved ACC, the actual romances were not its strength; the comedy of errors and the tight plotting and the weaving of romance together with ruminations on biology and politics were its strengths.
What I liked: It was nice to get more backstory and more insight into the world, although... the mysteries set up were really relatively mild, and nothing really got resolved.
I quite liked the scene where Fawn gets totally whammed by Dag's mother, because I was so afraid that MarySue!Fawn would walk all over Dag's mother By Teh Power Of Her Rightness, and of course realistically that would never occur, because Dag's mom is older, has much more fighting experience, and can read Fawn like a book. I should have trusted Bujold more on that.
Stuff that didn't bother me as much as I expected it to: I liked Fawn much, much better in this book, actually. She did have some of a personality transplant-- somehow the girl who was immature enough to run away from home without actually telling anyone (I mean, hello, don't you think they might worry and think you had been kidnapped or something?) became all cool and mature once she got married. (The girl who had sex with Sunny so she would feel wanted and valid didn't once act unhealthily-clingy towards Dag? Um, from my limited understanding of human nature, I Don't Think So.) But since I hated Immature!Fawn, and couldn't see what Dag saw in her, I was more okay with that than I usually would be.
I'd also been told Fawn was aspiring to be a Totally!Smart!BujoldHeroine. I was okay with the way that was done-- she doesn't know much, and is not exactly totally introspective, but she's bright and curious, and sometimes has dizzying intuitive leaps. Coming at this right after Harry Potter, the king of intuitive leaps... I can't argue with that. Bujold was also at pains to point out that Intuitive Leap != Right Answer For Right Reasons, and that also reconciled me a huge amount.
I was rather more sympathetic towards Dag's dealings with his family than I was with Fawn's dealings with hers. Maybe because, you know, he didn't run away without telling anyone and then expect them to treat him as a mature adult. Also because Fawn's family seemed relatively normal (though with homicidally-stupid brothers, yes), and Dag's family seemed, well, to have deep-seated psychological Issues.
What I didn't like: The May-December romance thing really kept squicking me out, because it would not die-- characters kept commenting on it. Which on one hand is a testament to Bujold's careful writing craftsmanship, because in reality, yeah, everyone would be commenting on it. However, since I was kind of on everyone else's side and not on Fawn and Dag's side on this, it didn't really work.
What I hated so much that the margins of this post cannot contain it: Well, the ending. I was all, hey, this isn't so bad, and then the ending happened and if I had been reading my own copy I would have thrown it, well, across the bed. I have a whole other rant about Dag and responsibility and girls and Miles, but I'll post that later.
It is a romance book. Fortunately, I was warned multiple times of this in advance. And seeing as how a) romance as a genre kind of bores me, and b) Bujold doing romance presses none of my adoration buttons and many of my rant buttons (more on this in a sec), well, there was a limit to much I'd like it, and I knew that going in.
I see (and I saw dimly after the first book) what Bujold is trying to do-- because she is a Real Writer, she can't stay in stasis doing the same thing forever; she needs to experiment. And I'm glad she does, because what she did in Chalion she could never have done on Barrayar, and in that case her experimentation was a grand success. However, her experiment with romance... well, now you've done the experiment, and now I hope you go on to experiment with something else. Please. Because romance is simply not Bujold's strength, though she may believe it is from the success of ACC. Although I loved ACC, the actual romances were not its strength; the comedy of errors and the tight plotting and the weaving of romance together with ruminations on biology and politics were its strengths.
What I liked: It was nice to get more backstory and more insight into the world, although... the mysteries set up were really relatively mild, and nothing really got resolved.
I quite liked the scene where Fawn gets totally whammed by Dag's mother, because I was so afraid that MarySue!Fawn would walk all over Dag's mother By Teh Power Of Her Rightness, and of course realistically that would never occur, because Dag's mom is older, has much more fighting experience, and can read Fawn like a book. I should have trusted Bujold more on that.
Stuff that didn't bother me as much as I expected it to: I liked Fawn much, much better in this book, actually. She did have some of a personality transplant-- somehow the girl who was immature enough to run away from home without actually telling anyone (I mean, hello, don't you think they might worry and think you had been kidnapped or something?) became all cool and mature once she got married. (The girl who had sex with Sunny so she would feel wanted and valid didn't once act unhealthily-clingy towards Dag? Um, from my limited understanding of human nature, I Don't Think So.) But since I hated Immature!Fawn, and couldn't see what Dag saw in her, I was more okay with that than I usually would be.
I'd also been told Fawn was aspiring to be a Totally!Smart!BujoldHeroine. I was okay with the way that was done-- she doesn't know much, and is not exactly totally introspective, but she's bright and curious, and sometimes has dizzying intuitive leaps. Coming at this right after Harry Potter, the king of intuitive leaps... I can't argue with that. Bujold was also at pains to point out that Intuitive Leap != Right Answer For Right Reasons, and that also reconciled me a huge amount.
I was rather more sympathetic towards Dag's dealings with his family than I was with Fawn's dealings with hers. Maybe because, you know, he didn't run away without telling anyone and then expect them to treat him as a mature adult. Also because Fawn's family seemed relatively normal (though with homicidally-stupid brothers, yes), and Dag's family seemed, well, to have deep-seated psychological Issues.
What I didn't like: The May-December romance thing really kept squicking me out, because it would not die-- characters kept commenting on it. Which on one hand is a testament to Bujold's careful writing craftsmanship, because in reality, yeah, everyone would be commenting on it. However, since I was kind of on everyone else's side and not on Fawn and Dag's side on this, it didn't really work.
What I hated so much that the margins of this post cannot contain it: Well, the ending. I was all, hey, this isn't so bad, and then the ending happened and if I had been reading my own copy I would have thrown it, well, across the bed. I have a whole other rant about Dag and responsibility and girls and Miles, but I'll post that later.
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Date: 2007-08-11 01:41 pm (UTC)I should note, it's 'alternate history' in big scare quotes: the what-if is "What if a time-travelling criminal gave Nero's empire the steam engine and Romans conquered North America?" ... for starters.
That said, all the American place-names (rivers, etc) that in our world were frenchified into English from Native words are Latinized, often hilariously. Our viewpoint character is a stuffy unreliable narrator Roman centurion; our protagonist is his sidekick, an American native named Aquila.
One of the things that corpsed me is that ... well. In the latter Roman empire, all educated high-class Romans spoke Greek fluently and casually, and spoke Latin for formal occasions and oratory. Therefore, in the Aquila books, whenever they'd be speaking Greek it's rendered as colloquial modern American English. Whenever they're speaking Latin, it's rendered as, "Oh, I say, old chap, pip pip!" stilted British Edwardian cant. :->
no subject
Date: 2007-08-13 05:49 pm (UTC)(btw, speaking of books that are funnier when you know a bit of history, this reminds me very vaguely of the "textbook" Dave Barry Slept Here, which is hilarious after taking ordinary high-school american history (at least, if you like Dave Barry, which I totally do); my roommate and I used it in high school to study for the AP exam.)
I looked for Somtow unsuccessfully this weekend at the library but I am overdue for an amazon bookrun...
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Date: 2007-08-13 06:14 pm (UTC)Also, mostly they're in small editions. Mallworld is another of his that I really like, for very different reasons -- it's a bunch of interleaved stories (think Thieves' World, only all by one author) that take place on a space station that is basically one huge mall.