Cryoburn: I thought it was a good book. It’s not one of her best, in my opinion, but it does have some good stuff in it about death and cryogenics, and it’s better than Sharing Knife and Hallowed Hunt. I think she needed to write it to get that spoilery thing out of the way. I am really psyched for the Ivan book, though! And yeah, awful title.
I thought the same thing when I was halfway through the series. And then I hit Memory and bounced off it hard (though not, to be sure, as hard as the characters did!) – I was split between I can’t believe she did that! To my favorite character whom I madly adore! and Hold on a second, when did I start adoring him? …And now they’re some of my favorite books ever.
Part of the problem, or something, is that Bujold writes so smoothly that you don’t realize how much she’s packing in in between the space battles. Like Bujold is the only hard SF writer out there, that I know if (please feel free to enlighten me with others!) who is really looking hard at the intersection of technology and reproduction. And she’s set up a society where you can have space battles and people swearing fealty in the space of two pages, without it being at all weird. And… well, I could go on and on.
I mildly liked these, though they are romance novels, and Dag/Fawn is a kind of squicky older-guy/young-girl romance (I mean, Bujold tries really hard to make it non-squicky, but there’s really no getting around the fact that Dag is, like, 60). I will say that the entire series is really one book thematically, and so things that horrifically annoyed me in the first book (which reads like “Couple gives up the world for love!1!1”) settle down as one reads on in the series (which is more like, “Couple figures out how to battle monsters,” which is rather more palatable).
They are Bujold books, and when Bujold’s at her worst she’s a darn fine writer, so I did enjoy them. But they just don’t hold a candle to her good stuff.