So, Winterfair Gifts was actually not my July installment of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga–that’s going to be Falling Free, which I haven’t gotten to yet–but I had basically forgotten to put Winterfair Gifts in the lineup as I had been unclear if it constituted a book or not. It’s a novella, hardly more than a short story, and doesn’t seem to have a standalone print publication, but I got the ebook and read it that way. It took me about an hour and a half to read the whole thing, which was a nice way to cap off a night where I’d finally finished a lengthy nonfiction book that it’d taken me upwards of 10 days to read.

Winterfair Gifts is a charming little story from the point of view of Armsman Roic, last seen at the end of A Civil Campaign wearing briefs, boots, his gun holster on the wrong way, a lot of bug butter, and nothing else. Roic is Miles’ most junior armsman, and until this point has mostly been a rather one-dimensional comic relief himbo sort of character, so it was fun to get a little bit of his background and see how things look from his point of view. Roic comes from a fairly provincial Barrayaran background and is somewhat in awe of all the galactic experiences and high-ranking shenanigans of his new employers, but he is doing his best to learn and expand his mind and lives in fear that Miles, Armsman Pym, and the other bigshots whose company he must now keep think he’s an idiot.

Roic’s horizons are abruptly expanded when two of Miles’ colleagues from his old life show up to Barrayar as wedding guests–the jumpship pilot Arde Mayhew, and the bioengineered werewolf-esque Sergeant Taura. Once his initial shock wears off, Roic finds himself very attracted to Taura, but unsure how to navigate picking up an eight-foot-tall galactic mercenary while constantly on duty.

Plot stuff happens when Ekaterin, who is already under some degree of emotional stress about the wedding, falls ill, and Sergeant Taura develops an unorthodox theory about one of the wedding gifts, which she attempts to investigate on her own. This doesn’t get very far, and instead, Taura and Armsman Roic find themselves trying to keep their cool while bringing in all sorts of very important ImpSec people that they’re not used to talking to. Fortunately, because this is a cute short short, the threat is eventually neutralized and the mystery solved, Ekaterin gets better and the wedding goes off beautifully, and Armsman Roic both proves himself Not An Idiot to his superiors and gets to snog Taura.

This story was overall pretty cute and fluffy (minus Ekaterin almost dying) in a way that wouldn’t at all have worked for me as an independent story with characters I didn’t know, but as a Vorkosigan Saga book it was a delightful little romp full of all our Fan Favorites and worked perfectly as an escapist palate cleaner from the day I’d been having. I’m looking forward to tackling Falling Free later this week.

Though Sad Irish Literature Month for me is traditionally March, I make an exception for Walter Macken’s Irish Trilogy. I read the first two at my dad’s cabin in Maine and I was going to read the third one there, too. The copies I have are ancient 1970’s editions from when my dad was living in London before I was born and as such I consider them to be Family Heirlooms and I will read them properly.

The first book in this trilogy, Seek the Fair Land, takes place during the Cromwellian ravages and I read it several years ago. Last year I determined to make some progress and read the second book, The Silent People, which is about the years leading up to and during the Great Famine. This one, The Scorching Wind, takes place in the 1910s and ‘20s, during the war for independence and the civil war that immediately followed.

Before I get into the book properly I must point out the things that this book has in common with Ken Loach’s movie The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Loach is an Englishman but The Wind that Shakes the Barley, featuring a not-yet-Oscar-winning young Corkman named Cillian Murphy, is nevertheless one of the most tear-jerkingly powerful movies about Irish history I’ve seen, with bonus socialism and extra bonus Cork accents so thick you could cut them with a butter knife and put them on toast. So. In addition to the general time period, both works feature a protagonist who is initially reluctant to join in revolutionary activity, because he is a medical student who is therefore a) very busy studying to be a doctor and b) more about putting people back together than blowing them apart. In the movie our half-doctor revolutionary is named Damian and in the book he is named Dominic. (One major difference: Damian, being played by Cillian Murphy, is very handsome, and Dominic is frequently implied to be not so handsome–certainly not as handsome as young Cillian Murphy, anyway.) Both protagonists have brothers who, at the beginning, are more militant than they are, joining the IRA first, while our black-haired heroes are still reluctant. By the end, though, it is our younger brothers who have become more militant and take the anti-Treaty side in the war, while the older brothers become Free State officials, pitting brother against brother in a way that makes an extremely heart-wrenching and dramatic ending to a drama about war. Also both stories take place largely in the Western part of Ireland, far from the drama in Dublin–Loach’s movie was filmed largely on location in Cork, and Macken’s story takes place in and around his native Galway.

From thence the similarities end, but it’s enough that I tried to look up if Loach had ever mentioned the book in an interview or anything. I can find some webpages that claim the film was influenced by the book but I can’t find any primary sources where they are getting that claim from on a quick search. Ah well.

Anyway. The prose style is trademark Macken, with a lot of very simple descriptive sentences interspersed by the characters’ unpretentious thoughts and bits of Hiberno-English that someone unfamiliar with the area could spend years looking up. Many of the characters speak in Irish but the book doesn’t generally include it; it translates it to English When an Irish word is used because there’s no real English translation or it’s just one word, Macken doesn’t italicize; it just blends in seamlessly the way Irish words are normally incorporated into Hiberno-English. As far as I’m concerned, a real strength is the way the characters talk about politics, especially as people who have a lot of history but not necessarily a lot of theory–it sounds believable to the way real people at the time would talk about politics, and not like the author is performing educational dialogues for the benefit of the audience. The fights Dominic and Dualta have at the end might not be blindingly original but they sound like real fights people on the opposite side of an issue have.

Another interesting approach here is that Macken doesn’t spend a lot of time on the high-level news–other than everybody getting the news of the Easter Rising in Dublin, the book focuses on the individual experiences of the characters involved, with little in the way of dates, cameos by famous people (except one brief one from John Redmond), or the characters conveniently turning up at high-profile historical events. They ping back and forth between various IRA operations and trying to go back to regular life for various stretches of time. The characters only ever seem to know the bits of things they’re involved in, and sometimes not even that–Dominic ends up on multiple jobs where his acquaintances basically just scoop him up and tell him to do something and he’s not really sure what it is that’s in the bag, or where they are going, or some other type of information that you’d think would be fairly critical to being involved in a guerrilla military operation. But no, everything’s done on such a tight NTK information ecosystem that I sometimes worried it’d actually be a security hole, making people do things they hadn’t agreed to with only your judgment of their character that they’d go along with it.

Dominic’s journey from a reluctant revolutionary who would rather be left alone to study to a hardened veteran of the flying columns involves a lot of pretty nasty stuff. Macken really excels at foregrounding the humanity of everyone involved–including unprincipled mercenaries like the Tans Mac and Skin–without falling into the common modern trap of being like “Sure, the oppression is bad, but isn’t fighting back against it worse if you find yourself losing even one inch of moral high ground by doing anything even a little bit shitty to anybody.” Dominic doesn’t like everything he has to do as an IRA man, like burning a really big lovely house down in reprisal for another house burning, but his doubt and disgust that this is really necessary–his reluctance to accept it as necessary even as he acknowledges that it worked–doesn’t lead to him quitting or renouncing the IRA or deciding both sides are just as bad or anything. It’s just used to show how having to do all these terrible things sucks, and no cause or tactical justification makes it not suck. The exploration of what having to do awful things, as well as having awful things done to you, changes you, is, I think, the essence of what makes the novel so powerful.

One of the other great features is its incredible use of ambiguity, which I will not elaborate on because it would give away the ending.

Overall, I’m very glad I finally read these and I’m not sure what took me so long.

The ideal atmospheric reading choice here would have been to save this for a trip to New York, but as I don’t have one planned, I went ahead and read Cat Scully’s debut novel, Below the Grand Hotel, this past week–mostly in Salem, which I guess is acceptable because all horror novels are thematically appropriate for Salem. But this is a very New York sort of novel anyway, because it’s about the art scene and fancy hotels in New York in the 1920s, and nowhere is ever as 1920s as New York.

The comp titles for this book were The Great Gatsby and Hellraiser, which aren’t wrong, per se, but for me the other work it reminded me of the most was probably Libba Bray’s Diviners series. This is praise; I thoroughly enjoyed the Diviners series even though I was losing interest in YA by the time the last book came out.

Our protagonist in Below the Grand Hotel is Mabel Rose Dixon, a young woman from Georgia who, as so many artists have before and since, came to New York to seek her fortune in the performing arts. Mabel has recently been rejected as a Ziegfield Follies girl, not due to lack of talent but due to lack of the things Mr. Ziegfield really wants in his Follies, which is an extremely specific physical look and compliance with his sexually exploitative management style. Mabel is therefore–well, not forced, but certainly incentivized–to put her stage magician skills to unorthodox use as a pickpocket in order to fund her ability to keep body and soul together while she works to break into the industry. Unfortunately, Mabel goes after the wrong bit of jewelry, and body and soul thus become forcibly separated in a nasty deal with some demons within the Grand Hotel, a labyrinthine pocket universe that draws in desperate people and never lets them back out.

The book is part video-game-like mystery as Mabel navigates both the physical hotel and the web of secrets and lies that she is now entangled in, trying to figure out a way to not only escape the hotel herself but to free a shifting arrangement of other people’s souls as well. It’s also part meditation on the challenges and paradoxes of trying to be an artist and make art in an industry where not only is the art a commodity, but celebrity culture means that the artists become commodities themselves as well–and those commodities are subject to the rapid pace of both the whims of fashion and technological change. Scully really digs into what would make selling your soul to demons to perform in a murder hotel you can never leave appealing, which is, essentially, the alternative it provides to trying to scrape together a living in the supposedly non-demonic art world. Also there’s a lot of gore; every time Mabel gets to take a bath and change her clothes it’s like two pages before she’s covered head to toe in viscera again. It was a lot of fun.

While I am certainly enjoying all my early American history nonfiction reading, I am finding that the highlight of my reading month is increasingly whichever installment of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga I have on deck. I decided to schedule these out so I didn’t burn out on the series but I’m increasingly finding that as soon as I finish one I really want to run right back to the library and pick up the next.

This month’s book was Komarr, in which our hero Lord Miles Vorkosigan, now an Imperial Auditor, accompanies another Imperial Auditor (formerly an engineering professor) to the titular planet to investigate a mysterious accident that had destroyed part of the planet’s terraforming infrastructure. Much of the book is from the POV of the other auditor’s niece, a Vor lady of about thirty, whose husband is the administrator of the department that includes the terraforming project. Ekaterin is a great character and I immediately found myself hoping that she got out of her shitty marriage with her shitty husband, which was in fact taken care of in a plot-appropriately terrible way that made it all nice and complicated but also very satisfying. Excellent look into the dynamics of an emotionally abusive marriage and what it can do specifically to very intelligent people that are, in fact, more intelligent than their partners, which the shitty partners are insecure about. (Obviously, this book might be upsetting reading for anyone who’s been in a controlling relationship with someone who used the same sorts of tactics, but a lot of the interesting psychological stuff that goes on in the Vorkosigan Saga comes with the same caveat, and I like that the book deals with stuff that regular people go through as well as dealing with insane space empire political and technological intrigues.)

This is one of the few books I’ve read in quite a while where the romance brewing at the end actually does have me all wound up and invested in it. I am chewing the drywall to see where this goes. So far the secondhand embarrassment is exquisite and the various mental tangles that Miles and Ekaterin are getting up to in rationalizing their feelings to themselves are excellently illustrative of both of their characters and situations. It also illustrates the difference between “being vulnerable and letting somebody take care of you” versus “being sloppy and making somebody else clean up your mess” in a way that has no business being woven into a story about mysteriously exploding terraforming equipment on Space Holland (trade oligarchy built on artificially reclaimed land. You tell me Komarr isn’t Space Holland).

Anyway this series really has it all and does it all; it is going off in directions I would not have foreseen from the first couple books but which nonetheless all make perfect sense for the series that it is. When is my June 1 hold coming in?

My April installment of the Vorkosigan Saga was Memory, one of the Barrayar-based installments, which I’m coming to enjoy almost more than the off-planet adventures. After nearly a dozen volumes I’ve become emotionally invested in the success of Emperor Gregor’s rein, the security and progress of Barrayar, and the fortunes of House Vorkosigan, which is a neat trick given what a feudal hellscape Barrayar is. Maybe it’s because I live in a back-asswards imperial goon squad with a country attached myself, so I find it hopeful.

Anyway! In this book, something is wrong with Miles. Well, two things are wrong with Miles, on involuntary and one voluntary. This moral, medical, and professional dilemma eats up the first chunk of our book, and the results are quite bad for our hero, who is now out of a job and has nothing to do with himself except kick around an empty Vorkosigan House, a state of affairs deeply unsuited to his entire personality. Miles is uhhh sort of rescued from his doldrums by the arrival of a much bigger problem happening to somebody else. The someone else is ImpSec chief Simon Illyan, Miles’ former boss and old family friend. Miles is certainly not going to allow his total lack of standing or the direct orders of the acting ImpSec chief prevent him from going into problem-solving mode and making a grand nuisance of himself. He scrounges up some temporary authority by wheedling Gregor into making him an acting Imperial Auditor and wades energetically into a high-stakes cat-and-mouse game with… someone; he does not yet know who.

I am middlingly pleased with myself to report that I guessed the culprit pretty early on in the game, and pleased with the book to report that I ended up second-guessing myself out of thinking that because the villain did a good enough job misleading both myself and Miles away from them until the key reveal near the end of the book. It was a pretty good plot, worthy of ImpSec! This book also hit some real milestones in terms of personal and career shifts for a lot of the characters; it’ll be fun to see where things go next now that everyone’s got new jobs and almost everyone except Aral and Cordelia have had their romantic lives shaken up. (There’s an adorable old people romance that the younguns remained quite oblivious to while it was becoming increasingly obvious to me; I found the whole setup very charming.)

I’m super tempted to go and release my hold on Komarr early, but I have other things to read and don’t want to burn myself out. I liked this series well enough to start off with but it has really grown on me as it develops.

I picked up A. R. Vishny’s Night Owls at a very bookish wedding because I thought it sounded like fun, even though it’s YA and I’m not finding myself to really enjoy a lot of YA anymore. (I think I am too old and stuff written for today’s teens does not resonate with me.) But this one promised queer Jewish owl-vampires and a lot of old New York lore and some shenanigans with dead people, so I figured it could be fun.

And it was! I am not super familiar with Jewish folklore, so for me as a reader, the estries were a fairly novel take on vampires, a subject upon which I am otherwise very familiar (possibly too familiar). I also learned a lot about late nineteenth and early twentieth century Yiddish theater, a subject upon which I am again not familiar. I don’t think I am the primary target audience for this book, in that the author is Jewish and seems to want to write about Jewish things for other Jewish people, but I enjoyed it very much all the same–it’s YA, so it’s an easy enough read and willing to explain all but the most obvious stuff to its adolescent characters, and I’ve read enough hundreds of variously warmed-over Christian-derived monster books over the past three decades that it was really great to get something else.

The setup is as such: Clara and Molly appear to be in their late teens but are in fact each well over 100 years old because they are estries. They are the curators and inhabitants of an old Yiddish theater called the Grand Dame, which has been revived as an indie cinema. They rent this building from the prince of demons in exchange for pictures of faces, because how else are you going to get affordable rent in Manhattan when you look like a permanent 18-year-old.

The shenanigans really kick off when Anat, Molly’s current human girlfriend, gets possessed by the ghost of what might be Molly’s first human girlfriend, Lena, who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Other strange things are happening, too. Initially unbeknownst to Molly and Clara, their hot mess of a box office assistant, Boaz, is also dealing with supernatural stuff, because his family is cursed to be able to talk to ghosts, and the ghosts are getting bolder and pushier. In order to save Anat, and save the world from the demon prince’s machinations, all our main characters will have to come clean about their supernatural secrets and start being able to trust each other for long enough to piece together what is actually going on–which is difficult both because they’re all long used to keeping this stuff secret, and because in true paranormal romance fashion, they are all full of inconvenient feelings. This all builds up to a beautifully chaotic climax involving the space between worlds–the world of the living and that of the dead–manifesting as all sorts of stage and movie sets and places from the characters’ pasts, as various ghosts and demons try to kidnap our characters, steal the family heirloom that Boaz’ Aunt Hila uses to do medium-ing, and generally overrun the world of the living.

Trying to thwart ancient demons isn’t particularly easy–they are clever and have had a lot of time to practice being shady–so the tension remains pleasantly high as characters are crossed and double-crossed, especially in the second half of the book where saving Anat/the world gets quite time-sensitive and poor anxious Boaz is getting hassled by strong-willed secondary characters left and right. Overall I found this book to just be really cute and fun–it’s a pretty quick read, and I got through it over the course of one snowstorm. There’s teenage angst and demons with bird feet and a bunch of wish-fulfillment-y nerd shit about old movies; what else do you need from a YA fantasy?

For Christmas I bought my girlfriend a copy of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, both because it is generally delightful and because I remembered specifically that the worldbuilding and use of dramatic irony was incredible and thought it might be appealing from a gamemaster/game designer perspective. Then my weightlifting Discord server decided to start a book club and it was chosen as the first book, so I had to borrow my own gift in order to reread it, since it has been a long time and I didn’t remember much except the general vibes and the mental image of the House.

The vibes are, as they say, immaculate; both the dreamy, old-fashioned tone of the writing and the images of the House it conjures up are beautiful, suffused with both childlike wonder and a melancholy loneliness. A few things are clear to the reader right off the bat–our narrator has forgotten his own backstory, though he is in denial that he has forgotten anything; the Other is clearly a douchebag, though the narrator insists they are good friends–but this doesn’t make it any less satisfying as the story comes together, the narrator finding bits and pieces of the puzzle and putting them together even as they upend everything he thought he knew about himself, the Other, and the World he has been so meticulously researching.

Even though this was, in theory, a reread (sometimes I am as forgetful as the narrator about books I have read), I found it just as unputdownable as I had the first time I read it. It is good that it is short because otherwise I would find myself canceling stuff left and right to finish it. As it is, I once again read the whole thing in less than 24 hours. I got into bed at 8:30 last night so I could be sure I had at least a good two hours of bedtime reading in which to get properly into it.

This really is just a wonderful little jewel of a book, even if Rafael is a police officer.

Recently two of my dear friends got married, and gave away books as wedding favors at their wedding. They had quite a lot of copies so Sam and I ended up with five books collectively instead of the traditional one apiece. One of these books was Rachel Hawkins’ The Villa, a dual-timeline novel about two childhood best friends, now both writers in their thirties, who take a girls’ trip to a villa in Italy where a very famous murder happened in the 1970s among a bunch of drugged-up rock star types. The crew in the ‘70s timeline are based off of the Romantic poets from the infamous summer in Lake Geneva, where Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, John Polidori wrote The Vampyre, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley were insufferable to everybody (or at least that’s what I’ve heard), and Claire Clairmont was also there. Except, in this version, the Percy character, up-and-coming musician Pierce Sheldon, gets brutally murdered, and in addition to Mari Godwin writing a genre-defining horror novel, the Claire Clairmont character also creates an artistic masterwork, in this case a sad folk album.

Apparently some of the book is also inspired by the Manson murders, but I don’t know anything about them, whereas I know a fair amount about the Romantic poets and the infamous Year Without a Summer ghost story writing contest. This book drew from it really well–changed things enough to keep me guessing and make it feel like I wasn’t just reading a reskin of the events I know already, but full of fun little Easter eggs for Romantic poetry dorks, like Percy Shelley’s inability to realize that babies aren’t interchangeable.

This book does a good job of having both a thoughtful feminist perspective and female characters who are kind of awful. Everybody in the ‘70s crew is awful and also they’re all babies; the fraught relationship between Mari and her stepsister Lara, particularly the way they keep letting all these charismatic, creative, captivating, but ultimately shitty men get between them, is sad but very believable for teenagers. In the modern-day timeline, the fraught relationship between Em–a writer of cozy mysteries who stayed in her hometown and got married, then got sick, and is now going through a phenomenally ugly divorce–and Chess–who fucked off outta town as soon as she could and has now become an Instagram-perfect self-help writer–has to do mostly with things besides men but boy howdy does Em’s shitty ex-husband manage to insert himself into it.

There are a lot of good layers and reveals on top of reveals, which I won’t talk about here because I cannot be bothered to remember how spoiler tags work, but the result is certainly very compelling–when the novel started really picking up steam I found it difficult to put down. The aesthetic tension between the bright, sunny, live-laugh-love-ass vibes of the villa in the summer (and of Chess’ career) and the increasingly dark and fucked-up things we learn as the story unfolds is drawn in beautifully atmospheric, cinematic terms; Em clearly has a not just an eye for that sort of thing but a somewhat cynical hyper-awareness of it.

Overall, this was a really fun little thriller that weaves in a number of things that are Relevant To My Interests to create a deliciously claustrophobic story about creativity, jealousy, fucked-up interpersonal dynamics in many flavors, and the strengths and limitations to the curative powers of fucking off to Italy. Also, it really made me want to fuck off to Italy for a writer’s retreat.

Winter to me always feels like a good time to revisit Tolkien, so yesterday while recovering from Christmas I picked up the copy of Beren and Lúthien that I had borrowed from my girlfriend over the summer. Like most of the books on Tolkien’s unfinished works, this was put together by his son, Christopher Tolkien, as part of the run of post-movie-series books that revisited tales told or explicated in works like The Silmarillion and the History of Middle-Earth series, but that rather than being compilations of many different tales, focused on one tale per volume and took us through their development and the various drafts.

The tale of Beren and Lúthien is one of the most important tales of the First Age, and it is referenced a lot in The Lord of the Rings, especially as concerns the romance between Aragorn and Arwen. This work compiles various versions, both finished and unfinished, in verse and in prose, to illustrate the development of the tale over the years as Tolkien fiddled with it, changing names and occurrences and how much detail to go into. The early versions of the tale are interesting particularly for how they differ from the version alluded to in The Lord of the Rings, which must be regarded as canon: in the very earliest draft Beren is not even a mortal man, but an Elf (or Gnome) from a rival group of Elves. In addition, one of the earlier version features Morgoth’s (or Melko, in this one) lieutenant Tevildo, the Prince of Cats, a rather comic character who occupies the space in the more serious later versions occupied by Sauron (who also goes through a bunch of names, spending some time as Thu the Necromancer). Tevildo is some sort of demon in cat form who holds all other cats in thrall and makes them big and scary, and his enemy is the hound Huan, who sticks around through all versions of the story even when the silly cat vs. dog rivalry is abandoned. Some of the cats have silly names like “Miaule.” I loved this version of the story but it definitely had a more The Hobbit sort of bedtime-stories-for-children vibe than this particular tragic romance seems to call for. Sometimes we forget that Tolkien could be a very funny man when he wanted to be.

This book also has a bunch of gorgeous illustrations by Alan Lee, apparently the only person to do correct Middle-Earth illustrations, going by some of the nonsense I’ve seen. It really is just a gorgeous book, gorgeous story, gorgeous poetry. (And much easier to read than the HoME series.) Highly recommended for Tolkien fans.

The next installment in my Vorkosigan Saga reading project was Lois McMaster Bujold’s now-somewhat-unfortunately-titled The Vor Game, in which our precocious but physically fragile hero, Miles, having just graduated from the Service Academy, is now Ensign Vorkosigan. As his first assignment, Miles is given what, for Miles, is an impossible task: He’s got to stay somewhere boring for six whole months and keep his nose clean. To this end he winds up in the Arctic doing weather technician stuff, which he picks up pretty quickly, and things are comparatively uneventful for the first three months, minus one or two near-death experiences and the subtle hints of something being deeply and nefariously wrong with the commander.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, things at the Arctic base explode spectacularly after about three months, the commander is discharged for brutality (which is impressive in Barrayar, a notoriously pro-brutality society), and Miles is reassigned by his chagrined superiors to a suitably out-of-the-public-eye assignment with ImpSec, the military intelligence service. Here he is sent on a secret mission that is not to rescue the Emperor, it is about his band of mercenaries from the last book and the tense political situation among a bunch of planets that hold strategically important wormhole gates. All this goes absolutely tits up when the Emperor goes missing–something Miles is not informed about, and thus discovers only when he unexpectedly runs into his old childhood playmate and friend, Emperor Gregor Vorbarra.

From thence (actually starting significantly before this) the plot follows a satisfying structure of 1) Miles is in a Situation 2) Miles comes up with a brilliant plan to get out of the Situation 3) The brilliant plan doesn’t quite pan out and Miles is now merely stuck in a different and usually worse Situation. This goes on for about three-quarters of the book, when Miles amasses enough information to start turning the tables on at least some of his many, many adversaries and starts digging himself out of at least some of the situations. His main adversary for a number of the conflicts Miles finds himself embroiled in is the head of another mercenary company called Randall’s Rangers. This commander is a femme fatale type with a seemingly endless capacity for double- and triple-crossing people and a strategic mind that’s not necessarily always three steps ahead so much as always three steps in every direction, so that no matter what happens, she wins. She is also very short, but she’s pretty, making her an excellent and not particularly subtle foil for Miles. She has decided to “rescue” Gregor and set herself up as Empress of Barrayer. Miles does not like this idea, and even Elena, who hates Barrayar and left it on purpose, doesn’t seem to think Barrayar deserves such a fate as having Commander Cavilo for Empress.

Miles does eventually solve the mystery of why the Hegen Hub seems about to explode into warfare with nobody having any idea why, although he does not quite manage to prevent it from exploding into warfare. He does manage to figure out who should be on what side and get the information to the right places so that they actually do that, and then they win, which is nice. Gregor largely rescues himself. Miles is moved into a position where being an enfant terrible is less of a liability.

Honestly this is mostly just really fun military sci-fi. The characters occasionally pull out some Deep Thoughts that can sort of constitute Themes if you want, but mostly they are all little shits, and there is lots of intrigue and people getting beaten up and other things that it’s fun to see happen to little shits.

Next book just arrived at the library. I’m excited to see what situations our main little shit gets himself into this time.