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Most of the books in this series are quite standalone, but Barrayar feels more like the second half of Shards of Honor. This book follows Cordelia's attempt to survive and protect her new child in a hostile environment as Aral struggles with his new job as regent.

This book and its prequel are some of the strongest books in the series for me. I love Cordelia as an outsider character who hates what she sees in Barrayar but ties herself to it for the people she loves all the same. It's also nice to have "older" characters (which then feels a bit of a shock when the next book has seventeen year old hyperactive Miles). This is also a book that very much centers itself on children and families, and all of the side plots (Drou & Kou, the Vorpatrils, friendship with Kareen, Bothari & Elena) tie neatly into this as well.

One thing I noticed in this reread is how much thematic foreshadowing Kou's nerve disruptor injury has for Miles, obviously in terms of the disability-averse Barrayarans but also psychologically. Miles is carrying a boatload of self-loathing when we first meet him in the next book, and it helps to have been warmed up to the cultural and familial context around those feelings a little bit here.

My favorite moment in this book is the fight between Aral and his father Piotr; their dispute over the fate of baby Miles comes to a head and in a rage Piotr kicks both Aral and Cordelia out of all the Vorkosigan house. A sudden interruption as the emperor Gregor is threatened and Piotr and Aral instantly drop everything and align themselves with full trust to protect their liege together. This is also the moment where the novel shifts from social (politics) directly into action (politics) mode.

He paused, watching Aral, watching her watch Aral. One corner of his mouth crooked up, then the quirk vanished in a thoughtful pursing of his lips. "He's bisexual, you know." He took a delicate sip of his wine.

"Was bisexual," she corrected absently, looking fondly across the room. "Now he's monogamous."

Look, it's the 1980's and I'll give you credit for trying here, but wow does this line always catch me off guard and feel like such a backwards attitude about bisexuals.

I'm sure this line has been picked to death elsewhere, but I'm going to fall back on my previous rant about explicit identity labels in fiction; I think that it's a rare case that using them makes any media better, and like here they certainly don't age well. This exchange could have led with the attempted barb "he's also attracted to men" or "do you know he slept with Ges Vorrutyer", neither of which could have been negated and both of which could have had more interesting answers.

I decided for December I'm going to just do a bunch of comfort rereading, and my brain has been clamoring for "what if you just reread all of Bujold's Vorkosigan series again (again)". I could reread just A Civil Campaign like most people do, but maybe it's time to reread them all.

Shards of Honor is the "first" book in this series, and genre-wise feels like a space opera romance. (Arguably Falling Free comes first chronologically if you're being pedantic.) If you haven't read these books, most of the series stars Miles Vorkosigan, and this book is the setup of how his parents Aral and Cordelia met and its sequel deals with the circumstances around Miles' birth.

This book does need some content warnings especially for rape, sexual assault, alcoholism, and ableism. This book was first published in 1986, and I think the book cover listed on unseen.city is doing it NO favors in that department either. It's definitely got a good bit of gender stereotyping going on too, but I can honestly blame a lot of that onto the Barryarans rather than the text itself.

I like the amount of worldbuilding this book gets into. There's backroom politics from a planet the reader hasn't seen involving characters the reader barely has met, and it manages to stay coherent. The setup of the book involves Aral taking Cordelia prisoner on a new planet she is surveying, and we learn a lot through both of their eyes about the wildly different cultures that they each come from. Even though the book spends a lot of time side-eyeing the militaristic aristocratic Barrayarans (for good reasons), the scene where Cordelia comes back to liberal Beta Colony and has to escape non-consensual "therapy" will always stick with me; it feels like a parallel to abusers misusing therapeutic language--the same power and control dressed up more presentably.

It must be quite a shock to suddenly find out you're pregnant, seventeen times over--at your age, too, she thought. She squelched the black humor--he was so clearly out of his depth--and took pity on his real confusion. "Take care of them, I suppose. I have no idea what that will entail, but--you did sign for them."

He sighed. "Quite, Pledged my word, in a sense." He set the problem up in familiar terms, and found his balance therein. "My word as Vorkosigan, in fact. Right. Good. Objective defined, plan of attack proposed--we're in business."

Minorly, one small character detail I noticed this time around is how much Aral and Miles orient to problems by reframing them in more comfortable contexts: Aral here, through his word and honor, and Miles later through logistics and persistence. This moment from Aral feels like a future parallel of Miles resolving the uncertainty about how to court Ekaterine by (disastrously) considering it as if he were planning a military endeavor.

I think there's some parallel to the way they both cope with failure as well, with Aral getting insensibly drunk in this book after the events of Escobar, and Miles many books later coping with the events of Memory.

This is the third book in Sue Burke's Semiosis trilogy, that follows the events on Earth after some of the rainbow bamboo and other fauna from the planet Pax are brought back.

The previous books worked well for me because they told a story over time from different perspectives. Each segment could stand as its own connected story, and characters didn't have to be fully fleshed out because we were only getting a small slice of them. This book is more compressed in time and so we get a rotation of multiple views from the same characters, bringing back viewpoints from the beginning as a touchpoint at the end. However, there were a number of narrative perspectives that felt like they weren't doing enough narrative or worldbuilding lifting (especially the first couple), and seeing the characters again only made me see how weakly developed they were.

Overall, I enjoyed the evolution of the ideas of this series but the execution could have been better.

The setup of this story is that the twelve provinces of Concordia have sent their heirs on a voyage by themselves to the Goddess's Mountain, and while en route one of the heirs is mysteriously murdered.

The mystery in this story worked well for me. Each heir has a Blessing, which takes the form of some sort of magical power (fire breathing, invisibility) but it's considered gauche to ask people what form it takes. The reveal and ongoing discovery of what Blessing each heir has becomes part of the mystery. (And on top of that the narrator Ganymedes does not actually have a Blessing and has to disguise this fact from his fellow heirs.) There's some twists and complications, enough crumbs for the reader to guess at what might be happening, and it all gets a good reveal in the end.

The worldbuilding was a bit weak. It's a bit hard to be tossed into a fantasy world with a bunch of different countries, but the countries here all feel a bit shallow--they are all represented by an animal and they each have one feature and one magical hair color that they're known for. This also means that the reader has to be told about the background to all of these different countries (and that they probably couldn't be much more complicated, with twelve of them).

I had fun with this book and I enjoyed the mystery, but my biggest gripe is that the goofy internal narration just didn't land for me. It's not that I need my fantasy to be all serious all the time, but the silly narrator was not my kind of humor.

This novella is a story about memories, transformation, and love; it follows the demon Vitrine, whose best love is the city Azril that she writes about in a book kept in the glass cabinet of her heart. When angels raze the city to the ground, she curses one of them with a piece of herself, and gets to the work of rebuilding the city into what she remembers.

This is an interesting book to pair with Kalpa Imperial from the #SFFBookClub this month. The way Vitrine remembers the ghost of the old city interspersed with what the new city is becoming feels like it could be a chapter from Kalpa Imperial. Subjectively, there's sort of a similar lyrical style between the two as well.

I continue to love Nghi Vo's writing, and the way this book juxtaposes the fantastic with the literal rebuilding of a city brick by brick. However, the emotional crux is the relationship between the angel and the demon and this just wasn't my jam.

This is a fluffy novella about a space dragon trying to lead a crew for a salvage job in a universe that usually has a human rider running the show. The characters were fun, but this book was too much of a marshmallow for me.

The biggest conflict in the story was Lux's internalized worries about running their own crew. (Other conflicts like space horrors, mud, and dangerous wildlife are quickly and immediately solved with little repercussions.) It's not that I need a story to be gritty and stressful, but in order for a story whose emotional resolution is a space crew bonding together, I need more pulling them apart (either emotionally or via external circumstances) to have that pay off. Ultimately, this novella doesn't quite stand on its own for me, and feels like the first third of a book where everything is going well just before it doesn't.

This is the first in a series, and it poses a number of unanswered worldbuilding questions: how dragon and human society got to where it is, what went down with Lux's old partner Sar, and some other mysterious goings-on that are revealed at the end of the book. I enjoyed the worldbuilding about a universe seemingly built for humans that only grudgingly makes room for space dragons even as it depends on them, and I hope future books get into this more.

This is a young, trans fantasy story that begins with teenager Lorel switching places with her friend Lane to go join a coven of witches, trying to keep them from discovering that she's not a girl. It's not billed as YA, but I would give it that label--although there's a good bit of physical violence on the page, this is a coming-of-age story with a large focus on peer relationships inside a larger adult structure.

Unsurprisingly for a Margaret Killjoy book, this is a very trans story. Lorel spends the majority of her mental energy worrying about being found out, and even after her secret is partially revealed, there's still terfy antagonism and fears of acceptance. In a world with magic, I also quite appreciated the trans nuance of "do I want to change my body because other people would accept me more or because I want to change it for myself (and maybe I don't)".

There's a lot of neat smaller worldbuilding details here that I really enjoyed. Magic in this world is grasped through metaphor, and depending on the metaphor used there are different perspectives and tradeoffs. I like that the fantasy political landscape is a bit of chaotic feudalism, full of different groups of knights with different loyalties and values, rather than clear cut countries with rulers.

My real disappointment with this book is that I wish the characters had more depth. The protagonist Lorel doesn't really get much time in her home town before joining the witches, and we only get scraps about who she is or where she came from. The reader hears more about Araneigh's family than they do about Lorel's. It's also hard to know much about Lorel's self that isn't explicitly a response to being trans; she doesn't talk about herself much (because she's hiding her past), she volunteers for cooking (so as not to reinforce gender roles), and she works incredibly hard (and so that people look kindly on her if her secret ever came out). The dynamics between Hex and Lorel are the most interesting character bits, and there's a moment of tension about Araneigh's feelings around Lorel's body, but on the whole most characters feel fairly one note.

This is book one of a trilogy, so there's certainly room for the future. It also didn't end with a lot of hooks for the sequel, so I'm quite curious where it will go.