Shards of Honor

Hmm, feeling very puzzled after finishing this up. Perhaps this is the best way to express my feelings: I think I just read three different stories: a short, fairly effective adventure-romance story, a less successful war and romance story, plus a rather disturbing inferred story that I guess the author never intended?

Spoiler tags from here on out. So first story - two people thrown together in a survival situation, who develop a relationship even though they hate each other at the beginning. Think anything from Enemy Mine to Romancing the Stone. It's pretty well done - you can see how each of them starts noticing qualities they admire in the other, and their predicament is intriguing. There is a bit of off-key telling rather than showing when Cordelia explicitly narrates how she is finding him attractive, but I suppose you could chalk that up to the author still getting her feet under her, as this was her first book.Second story - here it gets a little weird and often contrived. There's a bad guy who literally idolizes the Marquis de Sade, and monologues his eeeevil plans up front. There's an escape that's dependent on a wildly implausible coincidence. Followed by an even more implausible coincidence. The character traits that made Vorkosigan appealing in the first act get muddied, even as Bujold seems to be trying to underline them. Nevertheless, there's a reveal that's quite satisfying and does set up a tension around "honor" and what it means, and it's still mostly a fun ride.Then Cordelia goes home and the whole story goes rather bonkers, and kind of limps over the finish line.Third story - I take it from a quick Google that Bujold intended this story to be face-value. It's a romance with a happy ending (with enough complications to set up the further story).But from the time Cordelia is heading home until I turned the last page, I was increasingly suspicious. There seems to be plenty of textual support for the notion that Cordelia is a totally unreliable narrator, and all the facile, clunky, and convenient notes early in the story are tells that hint at her successful brainwashing. We're told the Barrayar military can wipe memories and manufacture false memories to replace them. The Beta officials are convinced that Cordelia is a victim of this process, and perhaps that she's been made into a mole without her knowledge. Her behavior becomes more and more erratic, with symptoms that could be explained by paranoia and exhaustion, or could hint at something darker. Eventually she becomes so removed from herself that she almost murders her doctor, having strange, sadistic flashes of thought that could indicate a meditation on what war can do to good people, or could indicate programming by the enemy.Taking the latter view makes some earlier "mistakes" and strange details fall into place - the weirdly emphatic internal monologue notes about her attraction, the sudden marriage proposal, the mustache-twirling villain, the convenient reappearance of known characters, the issue of where Vorkosigan got his intelligence, the "benevolent and self-sacrificing" reason why she must resist Betan psychological probing at all costs, and finally her sacrifice of her entire identity without a look backward. Please tell me I'm not the only one seeing this?

Really interesting start to the series. I came in thinking this would be focused on space battles, and instead we get a lot of traveling story and political intrigue. Though I also see space battles on the horizon for future books.

I'm certainly interested in seeing where this goes.

Thinly veiled romance
poor misunderstood bad boy
she sees his true self!