This is a one-off fantasy novel by Lois McMaster Bujold that she wrote a decade of so before The Curse of Chalion really thrust her into the fantasy world of publishing. It’s strong in some ways — the kind of humor we’ve come to expect, the creation of characters, the action sequences, and a sense that magic has to be chained to the nature world in understandable ways (as opposed to the kind of Wishing for More Wishes of Harry Potter’s charms and hexes). There’s […]