Mirror Dance, by Lois McMaster Bujold

[rowyn]

This is an enormously painful book; unlike most of the Vorkosigan books, I remembered significant sections of it with uncomfortable clarity. It's not so a matter of implausibility or coincidence in the action, but just that a lot of the events are agonizing. Even knowing how it would resolve was not enough to buffer against the rawness of it. It's an important book, but I was tempted to skip it just for it being so full of horror. I read it again anyway, and it does have a nicely satisfying denoument, so there's that. I am only giving this one a 5, though. I don't think I'll be reading it again.

Next up is Memory, which I don't particularly recall. I think I'll finish the ninth Aubrey/Maturin novel first, Treason's Harbour, first -- I'm around halfway through it already.

Comments

[alltoseek]

Re the Mirror Dance torture porn: When I embarked on a re-read of Vorko, I was planning to skip Mirror Dance precisely because of the awful horror of it. But I went ahead and re-read it anyway. Then I discovered that while the torture occupies about 90% of the mental space of the book, it's only like one paragraph (the worst of it) in the printed page. Maybe a couple pages total, if you count various references that are more-or-less off screen or merely hinted at.

It's true that Mark is pretty dismal as a pov character. But it's really remarkable that he turned out as well as he did. Unbelievable, if you know anything about childhood trauma (especially the long term type with all sorts of colorful variations); tho possibly his early childhood was halfway decent? Hard to imagine what kind of people would raise kids for slaughter, or what kind of upbringing they'd give the kid. Really weird. And things only got worse from there.

But really, the whole Mark plot arc makes even less sense than Barrayar's regression to medieval times. I mean, absolutely no fucking way. And the amount of time and money poured into the project - a pure vanity project with next to no hope of succeeding and no hope at all of benefiting Komarr in any way. Who would even come up with it? It makes no sense.

Plot is actually not at all one of Bujold's strong points. I was going to make a list of plot holes in Vorkoverse but I gave up when I realized the very first page of the very first book (Shards of Honor) contains a giant gaping one.

It's forward momentum that carries the series over them - don't ever give your adversaries readers a chance to think too much, that's the ticket *g*