Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
54/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1991 Hugo Best Novel
Miles’s adventures continue, with all the twists, fun characters, double-crosses, and humor that make this series so enjoyable. The adventure is fun, but it really is the characters and how they relate to each other that impress the most. Four books in, and so far the only disappointment is that I didn’t find this series earlier.
53/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
This series continues to surprise and satisfy me. Lots of adventure that’s somehow both ridiculously improbable and entirely believable within the story, and characters that feel much more real than in many other books. There’s an underlying humor throughout, but also manages to handle resolving one troubled character’s fate in a way that respects their past and the present they had built. I’m increasingly glad my Hugo reading project started me reading these books.
46/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1992 Hugo Best Novel
Really good continuation of the story from Shards of Honor, even beginning the day after the earlier book ended. Bujold manages to create fascinating, sometimes relatable, and often very flawed characters, and to craft a world that’s an interesting mix of almost medieval feudalism and future technology. For a series I didn’t know anything about and initially approached with a little skepticism, I’m definitely understanding why it got the awards and the good words it has from many of my friends.
45/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
More interesting than I’d expected it to be, given that neither military nor romance are among my generally preferred SF genres. Bujold’s characters are interesting, making even the “captive falls for noble captor” scenario more workable than it might have been, though there were definitely still moments that didn’t really work for me. And there was an unexpected coda, unconnected from the main plotline and characters, that was a neat way to end the book.
