Lois Bujold’s Sharing Knife series attracted an unusually large amount of dislike for a Bujold book, primarily because it’s a bit of a genre straddler between fantasy and romance, and there are a lot of fantasy readers who are deathly afraid of girl cooties. (Or, more charitably, who weren’t expecting a romance-shaped plot, so were thrown off by a book that focused more on a relationship than on saving the world.)
If you don’t have any allergies to romance and go into the books knowing what they are, though, there’s a lot here to like. Bujold remains an excellent writer, her characters are always interesting, and the setting of this series is superb — it’s a post-epic fantasy with a bit of a western flavor to it. I can’t think of anything else quite like it.
I enjoyed all four of these books a great deal, and would gladly read more novels set in this world.
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