Winterfair Gifts, by Lois McMaster Bujold

[elfs]

So, having not read anything really compelling recently, I finally picked up Lois McMaster Bujold's Winterfair Gifts (huzzah for fictionwise!), which had been lying around in a dusty folder on my laptop since I had bought it for myself last Christmas.

I'm not going to give anything away, other than to say that it is not a science fiction story. Nothing SFnal happens. No exploding starships or menacing robots, no nanotechnological threats or reverse polarities. It is, like most of Ms. Bujold's stories, about people, and the way they interact with one another. It is a lovely story, told from the point of view of Roic, the armsman who was so cruelly humiliated in A Civil Campaign, and features Taura, the genetically engineered super-solider, uncovering a plot to make Miles' marriage hell.

Ms. Bujold is rapidly becoming a penbreaker for me: a writer who makes the tragic, the comic, and the tender so effortlessly easy that I can only reach the end of her books a little teary-eyed and muttering, "When I grow up, I wanna write like Lois."

(Yeah, and Helprin, and Clute, and Weber, and Lem, and Yoshino, and Ohnogi, and all the other stylists and writers over the years who I have admired.)

Comments

[memegarden.livejournal.com]

Read any John Crowley? He's the one who regularly makes my jaw drop in awe. Some of his writing is fantasy, some is SF, and some is neither. His most recent book, which I'm still reading, is The Evening Lands: Lord Byron's Novel, and it is that, among other things.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Crowley, unfortunately, seems to leave me cold. I've tried, I've tried so hard to read Little, Big, and every time I get about thirty pages into it and hit the six deadly words: I don't care what happens next.

[memegarden.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's a shame. You might try one of his shorter works (such as Great Work of Time), but he might just not work for you.