Charlotte Kersten

Summary

When Cordelia Naismith and her survey crew are attacked by a renegade group from Barrayar, she is taken prisoner by Aral Vorkosigan, commander of the Barrayan ship that has been taken over by an ambitious and ruthless crew member. Aral and Cordelia survive countless mishaps while their mutual admiration and even stronger feelings emerge.

Review

Lois McMaster Bujold’s fantasy is awesome, but despite knowing this I’ve been intimidated to take the plunge into her famous sci-fi saga because…holy shit, there are a lot of books!! I finally decided to be brave for my 2024 r/fantasy bingo challenge and used Shards of Honor for my space opera square. I’m now really glad I started this series and I’m excited for what’s to come next – Shards of Honor didn’t blow me away by any means, but it was really solid sci-fi story. I saw a lot of Bujold’s strengths at play and enjoyed a few new aspects of her writing that I hadn’t necessarily seen before.

First of all, I love her characterization of badass women who aren’t the typical early 20s ingenue or the hardened, caustic Strong Female Protagonist who has become almost equally boring to me. Cordelia is an absolutely wonderful character to spend time with; she’s incredibly smart and brave, and she embodies her principles in a way that’s truly admirable. She’s also very funny! This is one of the sides of Bujold’s writing that I don’t think shines as much in the fantasy of hers I’ve read so far, and I enjoyed it so much here. The sequence where Cordelia escapes her home planet stands out as particularly great. The humor doesn’t detract from the book’s more serious themes and moments as it explores the massive human cost of caring for military power above all else. I’ve also bounced off of all of Bujold’s romances so far and was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked the relationship between Cordelia and Aral.

I understand that Borthari is an important character in the following books and I’ll be interested to see how that goes because his depiction was one of the stranger parts of this book for me. I think part of it comes down to the fact that Bujold defaults to a semi-questionable depiction of severe mental illness that can be at least partially attributed to this being written 40 (!!!) years ago; he’s described as someone with schizophrenia at one point and “split personalities” at another point, and his depiction doesn’t particularly resonate with either of those conditions, at least as I read him and know the conditions. His role as Vorrutyer’s batman who has this delusional fantasy of romance with a woman he rapes is something I would really like to see explored more, especially because for a book this old I was impressed with Bujold framing him as being simultaneously doing harm and victimized himself in this situation.

His decision to raise the daughter that’s a product of this situation is a complicated one that I had to think a lot about, and I really am glad I got to examine my gut reaction of discomfort in more detail. It could be a source of a lot of character exploration/growth or it could fall flat for me, so I’m curious to see how this develops as I continue with the series (someday……….).