Review: Knife Children

Knife Children by Lois McMaster Bujold
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've not been enjoying Bujold's recent work as much as her earlier stuff, and in part it's because she's backed off what used to be her signature writing approach: Look for the thing that would cause the most trouble for the character, that they least want to happen, and have that thing happen. However, she does do that in this book at least once (even though it derails this book's main character's plan to connect up with the main characters of the series, making that a tease that's never paid off).

This is definitely a softer Bujold, but the focus is on the relationships, on working through the consequences of a youthful misjudgement from a perspective of more maturity, and in those terms it works. Her characteristic running of the external dialog and events side by side with the main character's internal reflections on them mostly works well, though in the audio version I listened to, there are a couple of places where it wasn't immediately clear what was dialog spoken aloud and what was internal reflection.

All in all, good for a new Bujold, and though that isn't the high praise it would once have been, it does get it into the bronze tier of my Best of the Year.

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