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Read Beguilement (2011)

Beguilement (2011)

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Rating
3.71 of 5 Votes: 3
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ISBN
0061139076 (ISBN13: 9780061139079)
Language
English
Publisher
harper voyager

Beguilement (2011) - Plot & Excerpts

Note: I believe I am the only person on the face of the earth who hated this book. If you liked it, this review will annoy you. Also, be advised that there will be spoilers for what we might loosely term the plot in what follows. This book suffers from three main problems: 1. A fascinating world that gets built in the first few pages and then utterly abandoned in favor of2. An amazingly unengaging, unbelievable romance between a typical Bujold guy and3.Mary SueThe thing is, this is actually a solid fantasy world; it had the potential to be as interesting as the one Bujold created in The Curse of Chalion, and maybe in future books it will be. But here, the world gets shunted aside so that 85% of the book can be about the Great Romance. Which is not all that great, in my opinion, or even tolerable.Look. I love romance FF. But I'm not a good romance reader; I tend to choke on emotion, and an author has to be good to get me seriously invested in a relationship. But. But. Even if I loved romances, I think I'd choke on this one. Our heroine, Fawn, a hideously naive and very young farmgirl, meets and falls (intensely, world-endingly, OMG GREATEST PASSION OF ALL TIME) in love with the hero during a week in which she: is jilted, leaves home and everything she has ever known, is violently abducted, is nearly raped, and is made to miscarry by a creature she'd believed was just a myth. Among, you know, other notable events. Most people would be too distracted by these events to breathe, never mind fall in love. And our hero, Dag - intelligent, highly talented, much older and more knowledgeable and talented than Fawn, with a Tragic Past and a Great Lost Love - meets and falls in love with Fawn despite a) having steadfastly refused all romance since the Great Lost Love, b) being emotionally distant and embittered, c) having absolutely nothing in common with Fawn, and d) being old enough and smart enough to know better. For a person like Dag to fall in love - well, I could buy it, but it would have to take months or years, not days. There'd need to be some build, is my point, and not just a shortcut to heat coiling in his belly at her touch. And Fawn - she's adorable, cheerful, industrious, sweet, resilient, essentially flawless, and utterly uninteresting. In other words: hello, Mary Sue! I think I first suspected that she was a Mary Sue when, in the first couple of pages, I was told that she has long, lovely, bouncing curls even though she has been living rough. I have curly hair. Trust me when I tell you that after a few nights of sleeping in haystacks and a few days of hard travel, it would be a giant matted mess attractive only to birds seeking a nesting spot. Only Mary Sues have hair that stays gorgeous under such circumstances. But, look, I'm not just judging her on the hair. Fawn has so many other traits (Industry despite major illness! Open-mindedness despite being raised in an utterly closed-minded culture! Cheerful acceptance of everything! Adored by all who meet her!) that make her Mary Sue that I'm saddened that Bujold, who has created fabulous characters, wrote her.This book does display Bujold's very competent writing. And I have a vague, distant hope that a future volume of the series will explain the weird romance - maybe it's unnatural or magical in origin? But, basically, reading this, I found myself wishing Bujold would just write some terrible AU Spock/original female character and post it on fanfiction.net so she could get this out of her system.If you can buy into the romance, you'll love this book. If you can't, you'll want to stab something while you read this, because the romance is all this book is. I can't, in good conscience, recommend this for anyone, but I will say that many people seem to love it. Just - oh my god, so very much not for me.

I really enjoy Bujold's imagination. Her fantasy ideas are never like anything I've ever seen before and her worlds are so rich and complex and utterly believable. And she is so good at letting them unfold slowly and naturally and at making characters that I totally fall in love with. This is actually the second time I read this book, I don't usually read books twice, but I bought it for a quarter at my mom's library last week because I didn't have anything to read and I was desperate. I had been rather disappointed on my first read of this book, it reads something like a romance novel (and I do enjoy a good romance novel) but that isn't what I read Bujold for or what I'd been in the mood for maybe. On this second read-through though, I was so much more struck with the world she was building and the philosophies behind it. I loved it so much! Everything in the world is filled with a quality (called ground)(kinda a plutonic ideal aura) that makes it its own essential self, that when you create something new, the ground itself shifts and changes and holds that creation together. This ground was a source of an disappeared ancient mis-handled magic, but remnants of that magic sometimes leak back into the world in frightening creatures called malices. And these immortal malices suck ground (and turn into a gray lifeless dust) everything around it, from animals and humans even to plants and rocks, getting stronger and more cleaver as it steals the intelligence and knowledge in all those stolen grounds. Only the lakewalker peoples can see ground ("farmers" can not), and only the lakewalkers can teach the malices to die. But the malices are multiplying while the lakewalkers are slowly dwindling, no longer able to keep up with even their minimal patrols. It's becoming apparent to a few that a new way must be found, that the strict social divisions between lakewalkers and farmers are making matters worse, that the world is slowly coming unraveled from every direction, and yet few can yet see it.Oh it's so lovely, I want to go read it again.

What do You think about Beguilement (2011)?

I waited a year because someone had warned me that The Sharing Knife: Beguilement was actually the first half of a book summarily chopped in half. So I waited until the second came out. The story appears to be a fantasy set in some pastoral world near water (I later found out the setting was a parallel world Great Lakes region, an area I'd never seen, and so did not recognize), where we are introduced to two cultures living in uneasy coexistence: the Farmers and the Lakewakers, who patrol everywhere looking for malices (bogles to the Farm people) that suck all the life and energy out of people, animals, land. The resultant blight can last a century or more, and affected are not just the living, but the environment such as rocks and soil. The Lakewalkers aren't particularly trusted by the Farm folk, who own and farm land, but are protected by them: the Farm folk are unable to fight the bogles.The story begins when a Farm girl--Fawn, just barely eighteen--runs away from home, gets grabbed by a malice, is rescued by a Lakewalker, and ends up spending enough time with the man (for reasons having to do with the eponymous Sharing Knives) that she begins to fall for him. Even though she's eighteen and he's fifty-five.Bujold has given us middle-aged, battle-weary heroes before, in Aral of the Miles books, and Caz of the Chalion books, and she makes them fascinating and distinct. Dag is tired, and missing a hand, though anyone who assumes he can't hold his own in battle is in for a nasty surprise. He's grief-driven, so tight-wired that he's got no emotional edge on an eighteen year old--one could say that he's emotionally retarded by his long, shock-filled life. Everyone in both cultures disapproves of these two as a pair; she, a blithe spirit, becomes stubborn, and he, sheepish, begins to wake up to the possibilities of life again, instead of the close focus on methods of delivering efficient death. Together they are an anomaly, and not just because of the age and cultural divide, but because something happened when they killed that malice together to make it clear that there's a lot of mystery still buried in their history.This is a new world, at least initially quieter in tone and drive than the Miles books. Many fans have grumped about anything Bujold does that is not-Miles. But the over-arcing Miles story itself has become not-Miles, at least, the powerful emotional overdrive and desperate-death threatening political situation (all fuel-injected by Mile's high octane personal problems) are not the same rocket, or rather, that rocket has achieved high orbit. Very much present in these two books are the signature Bujoldian gracenotes: everyday humor thoroughly grounding flights of heroism, angst that never whines, grief that does not overwhelm the story with scenes meant to drench the reader in pity. What Bujold does in the first book as she carefully develops every character (never settling for stereotypes or single-motive actions) is remind the reader that outside the firelight and the merry dancing, dark things do prowl.
—Sherwood Smith

Reading the reviews, the detractors seem to fall into certain categories. Those who were expecting something like her Vorkosigan series and are disappointed it's fantasy. (Hello, it's pretty explicitly marked as fantasy from the description to the cover.) Those who were expecting something like her Chalion series and are disappointed the emphasis on this first book is on romance. (Yes, it is. I think it's tons better than the usual book on the romance aisle, but if you sneer at books built around a love story, by all means you'll want to pass this by.) Finally, several seemed disturbed that this is a May/December romance about a teenager and a man over fifty. (And one that unlike Angel or Edward *gasp* doesn't look young, apparently the only thing that matters.) The age difference doesn't bother me. That Fawn is so young might have, but it does help this is a frontier society. They grow up fast and marry early there--and given Fawn is already pregnant when Dag meets her, it's not as if I feel he "corrupts" an innocent waif.For me, that this isn't anything like Chalion or Vorkosigan is a good thing. I like versatile authors who don't write the same book a gazillion times. This is a very different world than either of her other series. Not faux European high fantasy nor futuristic Space Opera. Instead this has the feel of the American frontier--perhaps a transformed world from our own far future. I found the entire world Bujold created with the malices intriguing. And as with her other books, I love her characters. I liked spending time with them. And as this is only the first part of a four volume series that can be seen as one novel, that's important.
—Lisa (Harmonybites)

I liked this. I know some people felt let down or disappointed when comparing this to other books by the same author but because this was the first book of hers that I've read I didn't have the same bias.I do agree that the romance takes center stage. I too would have liked it if there was a bit more action other than that which was at the start, however, I don't mind the romance, especially if it's done well and I really think it was. Dag and Fawn both have their share of emotional baggage but it didn't weigh the story down. Dag isn't flashy or abusive or dominating. I think in the romantic sense he's one of the better male lead characters I've read about in a long time. The things he said about Fawn to her family, specifically about why he loved her were sweet and extremely heartfelt and I think probably shamed them all a bit. He was the only one who could see her worth, other than her aunt Nattie and he spoke up about it. The way he handled Fawn's scheming brothers was applause worthy. Fawn did come across as being innocent and sugar sweet. Everyone liked her and I think that's where a lot of the Mary Sue references came from, but I just didn't see it that way myself. I thought she really was likable, she wasn't good at everything. She certainly was naive about all things outside of farming but she sought to enlighten herself in what was probably the only way she knew how, by observing and asking endless questions. This didn't bother me so much and at certain times I thought it was humorous.I think the strongest qualities of this book are dialogue and character interactions. The author writes them very well. I enjoyed the book and I would have probably given it five stars rather than four if there had just been a little bit more malice action towards the middle or the end rather than all in the beginning.
—Laura

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