A new book in mass-market paperback format — you don’t see that often these days, do you? Or perhaps you do, and it’s just me that never stumbles onto these paperbacks any more.
Anyway, this book collects three novellas, all around 150 pages long, and all previously published separately as e-books. It’s an interesting way to do a series of fantasy stories — it would have been very difficult to do before the e-books became a thing, because fantasy readers traditionally don’t seem to like to buy 150 page books, and they resist buying “short story collections”, too, but Bujold seems to be having a success with this approach, since this is the third collection.
Unfortunately, this is easily Bujold’s worst book ever. (So, naturally, it’s one of the highest-rated Bujold books on Goodreads.)
Bujold is a solid writer — one of the charms of her books is how easily they go down. Reading the first novella here, I frequently found myself going “wat?” after reading a paragraph, and then re-reading it I still didn’t quite understand what she meant. I’m guessing (since these are written primarily to be published as e-books) that they didn’t go through the normal editorial process that most papery books go through. Not that Bujold seems like somebody that would suffer through heavy editing by an editor, but just writing knowing that somebody will be going through your text with a red pencil sharpens your writing? I’m just speculating (I mean guessing), but it’s bizarrely awkwardly written for Bujold…
And the novella is basically just a short story that has been extended way beyond the breaking point.
The second novella is a lot of fun. It’s got a spiralling worse-into-worse story structure, and works perfectly. The third novella is downright tedious — it’s about finding out the source of a mysterious plague, and it’s the most repetetive, dull thing. I didn’t know Bujuld could write something as boring as this.
But I’d still get this book for the second novella.
Penric’s Labors (2022) by Lois McMaster Bujold (buy new, buy used, 4.28 on Goodreads)
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