baycon photos

Over in the land of my other tentacle: Baycon photos.

book review: The Hallowed Hunt

The Other Change of Hobbit had a table in the dealers' room at Baycon, and so I of course grabbed this, Lois McMaster Bujold's latest in her distorted-mirror-of-Europe fantasy series. The previous two novels, The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls, concerned themselves with Chalion, an area that corresponds roughly to one of the kingdoms of pre-Reconquista Spain; this novel moves the focus to the Weald, which is more Germanic.

Overall, I like this book less than Paladin of Souls, which is still my favorite of the three, but I think it's as good as Curse of Chalion albeit in a different way. Unlike either of the previous two, this is an ideas novel, and for that reason may seem a little off to those used to Bujold's usual, which is strictly character-driven. The ideas she explores here are most satisfying, though. We get bits of the darker side of orthodox Quintarianism; we see magic that does not flow from the gods; we get a much larger picture of the world.

I now wish to quibble with Heidi Bond's spoilerful review of the same novel, and so I must give spoilers likewise. Stop reading here if you haven't read the novel yet.

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