Review: Penric and Desdemona

[rowyn]

 ​I forget if I ever reviewed the first novella in the series, but Bujold has three novellas total in the "Penric and Desdemona" series now.  I finished reading "Penric and the Shaman" recently, and I gotta say how much I like this series. I love the way Bujold portrays the gods in the Five Gods setting, because they are a real power in the stories. They are, at various times and some times simultaneously, awe-inspiring, benevolent, utterly terrifying, subtle, and overwhelming in power. The characters in the setting pray to the gods, and sometimes their prayers are answered, and usually this is both terrifying and to their benefit. It feels very much in the nature of divinity. One of the running jokes of the setting has characters thinking hard about whether or not they actually want to pray.  "Do I want divine intervention here?  I know what divine intervention looks like."  There's a delightfully alien feel to it.

 

This is especially in evidence in "Penric and the Shaman", which is one of those stories when the gods are clearly working hard to bring people together to do what needs to be done, whether they want to or think they can or not.  It's also one of those stories where all the characters have good reasons for what they're doing and why they're doing it, which I always appreciate.

 

I enjoyed "Penric's Mission", too, which had more about their form of sorcery and fewer miracles. I'm kind of annoyed at this one, however because it didn't really resolve at the end.  It wasn't a cliffhanger, but it left the characters in an uncertain position with no clear indication of how they'd end up after it. 

 

Still, I have come to adore both Penric and Desdemona. One of the things I really like about the three novellas is that Bujold has let a lot of time pass between each one: Penric is 19 or 20 during the first, then mid-twenties for the second, and about thirty during the third.  The reader gets glimpses of what he's been doing between stories, and you can see the way the relationship between Penric and Desdemona has changed and deepened over time, and the way that Penric continues to mature. I'll give the series as a whole an 8.5. Definitely recommend, and I'm looking forward to the fourth one.  Bujold's released all three in the last 18 months, so I'm hopeful it won't be a long wait for the next.

Comments

[wyste]

They're some of my favorites as well.

[rowyn]

Bujold is great. ♥

[tuftears]

Yes! I have been reading and enjoying these as well. ^_^ Their relationship is adorable.

[rowyn]

I have to sign up for the Bujold newsletter or something so I can stop checking Amazon to see if there's a new one yet. :D

[alltoseek]

I'm kind of annoyed at this one, however because it didn't really resolve at the end. It wasn't a cliffhanger, but it left the characters in an uncertain position with no clear indication of how they'd end up after it.

This is pretty funny coming from you cuz about every other one of your novels does the same thing ;-P

[rowyn]

?

Demon's Lure and Silver Scales end in "uncertain position", but I can't think of any of the other thirteen books that I've published that do. Which ones do you mean?

Also, I published the sequels to those two books within the next, like, 60 days, instead of making readers wait several months or years to see when/if I'm gonna share the rest. :P (Although the sequel to Penric's Mission came out around three months later, so this one was a very short wait by trad pub standards. But IIRC it took until the novella after that one to wrap one of the plot arcs from Penric's Mission.)

I think I do find it more irritating when a series has a few standalones and then an installment that doesn't stand alone, though. I don't like it with the first book, either. But if you set a pattern of standalones and then break the pattern, it's jarring.

[alltoseek]

Moon Etherium may not end in literal "uncertain position" but it feels like the first half of its sequel - there's all this unresolved stuff still out there.

The Etherium, Demon, and Silver Scales series are the books of yours that most grabbed me, and they feel the most like full novels - if you read the whole series. So I suppose they play a large part of your oeuvre in my mind.

And you can think of it this way - do the sequels of those series really stand alone? Maybe in the Etherium one, I suppose, which is your point. I can't remember where the break is between Sun and Moon. I know most of Sun is these deception romances, but I thought there was Moon wrap-up stuff in there too.

But if you add the books in those series together, that's 7 books, which is half the 13 total.


PS: A Rational Arrangement is your other work that comes to mind that is a full standalone novel. (Of course Further Arrangements depends entirely on it). The others are standalones but feel kinda lightweight, for one reason or another.

Bujold's issue in the Penric series is that she committed to making them all novellas, and that central series of 3 you complain about is really one full novel, sort of. Except it's more like a series of adventures than a full novel, which is how she could make those breaks.

[rowyn]

Oooh, you have different criteria here than I do.

My only concern is "does the book complete the main story in a satisfactory fashion?" So Demon's Lure and Silver Scales fail, but Angel's Sigil and Golden Coils are fine because they wrap up their stories and the main dangling threads from the first books.

I consider The Moon Etherium and The Sun Etherium to be standalones: each book wraps up its main plots and subplots. The Sun Etherium has spoilers for TME if you read it first, but I don't think of it as necessary to feel like TME is complete. The Twilight Etherium doesn't stand alone, in the sense that TME did a lot of the character development for the TTE characters. But TTE isn't wrapping up the main plot or the main romance of TME: it starts its own plot and and its own romances, and resolves both.

Anyway, the other thing here is "sometimes I intentionally do things as an author that would annoy me as a reader." Because I am not representative of all readers. There are SO MANY hugely successful series that do not have standalone plots for each book. Obviously it's not an issue for the vast majority of readers -- it may even be a selling point! So there's no compelling reason for me to avoid it. I mean, I have to wait for me to write the ending regardless of where I break the book up. XD

[alltoseek]

I kept thinking of LOTR as I was writing my comment. 3 volumes for 6 books total. And I doubt any of them would stand alone. I don't know if he published all in one go or if he drove readers insane for several years til they all came out *g*

I was thinking that, along the lines of the Penric central 3-novellas-in-one-arc issue, you could try to pull out just the "dump the ring in Mordor" travel adventures from LOTR, leaving out the greater issues and side stories and the wrap-up where the hobbits go back to the Shire and you see how much they've developed since they left - Anyway, maybe you could pull out three separate travel adventure stories that would feel like the Penric story arc, where they'd have a novella's worth of adventure getting from, say, the Shire to Rivendell, then Rivendell to, I dunno, Faramir's cave? Then finally to Mordor and plonk into the Crack of Doom, and yay end! It might feel about the same as the Penric arc *g*

[rowyn]

Y'know, I put off reading the Lord of the Rings for years as a kid, in part because it was So Long. XD (But also because what was the point without Bilbo? He was the best part of The Hobbit!) If I hadn't known in advance that it was all one story and packaged as books for printing convenience, I would have found the ending of Fellowship of the Ring extremely annoying too.