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    The Sharing Knife, Volume Three: Passage
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    The Sharing Knife, Volume Three: Passage
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    The Sharing Knife, Volume Three: Passage
    Ebook497 pages8 hours

    The Sharing Knife, Volume Three: Passage

    By Lois McMaster Bujold

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    “A thoughtful and skillful author.”
    —Cleveland Plain Dealer

    One of the most respected writers in the field of speculative fiction, Lois McMaster Bujold has won numerous accolades and awards, including the Nebula and Locus Awards as well as the fantasy and science fiction genre’s most prestigious honor, the Hugo Award for Best Novel, four times (most recently for Paladin of Souls). With The Sharing Knife series, Bujold creates a brand new world fraught with peril, and spins an extraordinary romance between a young farm girl and the brave sorcerer-soldier entrusted with the defense of the land against a plague of vicious malevolent beings. In Passage, volume three in Bujold’s breathtaking saga of love, loyalty, and courage in the face of bigotry and dark magic, the devoted wedded lovers Fawn Bluefield and Dag Redwing Hickory are joined by new companions in their quest to find peace, acceptance, and a place in a most dangerous world.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9780061798221
    Unavailable
    The Sharing Knife, Volume Three: Passage
    Author

    Lois McMaster Bujold

    One of the most respected writers in the field of speculative fiction, Lois McMaster Bujold burst onto the scene in 1986 with Shards of Honor, the first of her tremendously popular Vorkosigan Saga novels. She has received numerous accolades and prizes, including two Nebula Awards for best novel (Falling Free and Paladin of Souls), four Hugo Awards for Best Novel (Paladin of Souls, The Vor Game, Barrayar, and Mirror Dance), as well as the Hugo and Nebula Awards for her novella The Mountains of Mourning. Her work has been translated into twenty-one languages. The mother of two, Bujold lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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    Reviews for The Sharing Knife, Volume Three

    4/5

    502 ratings29 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Romance is a deeply underutilized mechanism for worldbuilding. Two people from cultures that don't normally intermingle trying to build a satisfying life is a much better way to explore the nuances of culture than the more standard fantasy save-the-world plotline. It does make summarizing an individual book in the series trickier, though. Fawn's little brother Whit gets some wonderful character development in this one, and Dag's push for cultural integration meets all the snags I'd expect it to. This series is brilliant, and it's a shame it's so little-known.
    • 4/5

      This series reminds me of the "Clan of the Cave Bear" series from many moons ago in its trajectory. It's got vastly better written characters and plot, but I still think it will appeal to the same fans along with everyone who think Bujold is the mutt's nuts.
    • 4/5
      L.M. Bujold writes such lovely books. Her fantasy novels are a must for any true fan of the genre.
    • 3/5
      I read the first two of The Sharing Knife books all the way back in 2011. There were things I liked about them, but I was frustrated by how quickly the romance developed and how much it was the focus. Instead of reading the third book, I read Bujold’s other series instead. Given how much I love some of those books and that I've found most of them worth rereading, I decided to give this series another go. I'm glad I did.Fawn and Dag have left behind their respective communities and seek passage on a flatboat heading down the Grace River.I think this story’s strength is in how it is about journeys, family and community, and in the steady way it develops its themes. There’s the physical journey downriver, but the characters all have their own personal journeys: their boat-boss, Berry, is searching for her father and her betrothed; Fawn and her brother Whit have a chance to build a different relationship, away from their roles they occupied on their family’s farm; Dag is eager to take advantage of the opportunities to teach farmers about Lakewalkers, but doesn’t expect to wind up teaching Lakewalkers; nor to make such dramatic discoveries about his own, still-developing abilities and about what happens when Lakewalkers are cut off from others Lakewalkers. “My papa used” -- Berry’s breath caught, broke free again -- “used to say, Nothing worth doing is fun all the time. But it’s still worth doing all the time.”
    • 3/5
      This series is a little bit of a tug-of-war for me. I love the concept, and I actually really like the characters, as well, but I'm really not a fan of Bujold's writing, and the scenes where she delves into romance and the relationship at the forefront of the book feel nothing less than awkward to me. So, on one hand, I enjoy the story... but it's difficult to enjoy the reading experience. For readers who like traditional, clean romance and also like large-scale fantasy novels, this might be just their cup of tea, but I think I'm finally setting aside the series. The romance just feels more and more awkward, and although it may be that I'm being somewhat picky about the writing, the awkwardness just doesn't outweigh what I like about the series anymore.
    • 5/5
      In this third volume in the Sharing Knife quartet, Dag and Fawn are off to explore the world to find some answers or maybe just some more questions. Dag is developing new powers as a maker that he never showed before. He has also come to believe that the way Lakewalkers and Farmers interact has to change if the malices are ever to be finally removed from the land.Dag and Fawn, along with Fawn's brother Whit, begin to explore by retracing Fawn's journey to Glasshaven. From there, they find their way to the river. Dag has some idea of showing Fawn the sea as part of a belated honeymoon trip. There they meet with Boss Berry who is taking her flatboat down the river in the hope of discovering what happened to her father, brother and fiance who went down the river to sell a boat and didn't return. Fawn signs on as cook and Dag and Whit to do general labor.As they go down the river, they gather problems and people from beguiled Hod, to runaway patrollers Remo and Barr. Along the way they meet Farmers and rivermen and Dag tries out sharing Lakewalker secrets to begin to erase the rear and suspicion between Farmers and Lakewalkers.The trip takes a turn for the dangerous when they run into river bandits controlled by a renegade Lakewalker. Berry learns the fate of her loved ones and Lakewalkers and Farmers work together to end the threat. The worldbuilding is very realistic. Bujold mentions the accounts of the real keelboaters and others who traveled the upper Mississippi that she read for background. The characters are well-drawn and all grow and change through the book. I am eager to read HORIZON to get to the end of this epic journey.
    • 4/5
      Main review at the end, on Horizon. This is the one where they leave Dag's camp and journey down the river
    • 3/5
      The continuation of the Sharing Knife series is enjoyable and continues the exploration of the relationships between farmers and Lakewalkers. The story has more of a plot then the previous books, as the protagonists travel and met various people and make new connections. The book has more worldbuilding and focuses a lot on ground magic. I felt like the information presented in this book became more tedious and distracted from the story. I was less interested in the worldbuilding since this is already the third book in a 4 book series. Still very well written and looking forward to reading the last book.
    • 3/5
      This is the third book in the series and I have to say that I liked it a lot more than the previous book. Dag and Fawn are traveling to see the ocean. On the journey, Dag discovers new things about his ground. He discovers ways to use it that are not normal to Lakewalkers and seems to have solved a longstanding problem that Lakewalkers have with using their ground. Dag and Fawn also help out the boat captain solve the disappearance of her father and fiance. The book ending doesn't hinge on a sequel which is good to know but also even better to know is there will be a fourth book.
    • 4/5
      This is the best of the series, to my mind. The sexuality is muted (thus suitable for teens) and appropriate to the marital status of the protagonists. The development of the relationships among the supporting actors is well done, and the explanation of the milieu is the best so far (Bujold appends a note about her research on the 19th-century US river-boat culture). A personal note: it seems to me that female authors write about male "heroes" as they would like them to be, which may be why they do so much of it. A female "hero" may be too susceptible to self-projection.
    • 4/5
      I think this is the best book in the series to date! I really enjoyed it. It's different from a typical fantasy novel, because the threat the protagonists fight against is ideological rather than literal.Dag and Fawn journey to the sea on a river flat boat with a whole new cast of friends. Their mission: to win hearts and minds, in hopes of resolving the long-standing distrust between the Lake Walkers and the Farmers.Excellent!
    • 4/5
      I think this is the best one of the series so far--and she definitely left it open for more books.
      This world is really interesting, and in this book the focus is a little less on Fawn and Dag (WHY does he have to be named that?) and their Forever Love, and more on other aspects of how their two societies mix.
      Plus, the old classic float-down-the-big-river-and-stuff-happens plotline (really it's just a variation on "Road Trip", which is probably the oldest plotline in literature) is an old classic for a reason.
    • 3/5
      This was actually a little more fantasy than romance, although it's still much more character development than action. (Apparently the first two volumes were intended as one book, which explains some of their pacing issues, and this was written from the start as a single volume.) It hung together for me much better than the previous two, although it's still a leisurely book.
    • 4/5
      I liked this quite a bit better than the first two in this series. The characters take to the river, and the setting adds a lot of interest and character to the tale. I'm still not finding the degree of emotional depth or intellectual challenge I did in the Chalion series or the humor and pathos of Vorkosigan, but the charm of this world is starting to get through to me.
    • 5/5
      4.5 stars. In this third installment of the Sharing Knife series, we discover that malices aren't the only threat to the denizens of the wide green world. This book takes a break from the Lakewalker-Malice war, but we are treated to a quaint little tale of Dag and Fawn journeying down a river in a flatboat encountering adventure and a multitude of dangers and obstacles along the way. I loved the story as well as the setting and atmosphere for most of this novel, so vivid that I could picture every single detail in my head. More than once I wished I could be the one sailing in a flatboat living that life on the river.This was a great read and I still love the main characters, but in this book Dag definitely steals the show while I felt Fawn's role diminished somehow. I swear, throughout the entire thing all she seems to do is cook and shop for food. Boring! On the other hand, Dag gets to do all this cool stuff, like play mentor to a couple of young Lakewalkers, experiment with magic (groundwork), and discover he has crazy healing skills.I also realized something with this book -- Bujold needs to come up with more ways to describe her characters' actions and behaviors! There just seemed to be an awful lot of "head tossing", "lip twitching" or "body curling" going on. By the time I got to about the fifty-seventh time someone tossed their head or twitched their lips, I was about to tear my hair out and scream.
    • 4/5
      This is the third book in The Sharing Knife series, and the first thing you should know is that these books are not self-contained. In fact, I read the four volumes of The Sharing Knife was intended as one novel, but was split up because of the length. So what we have is the middle part of a novel, perhaps the least action filled, with the young Fawn the farmer and her quite older Lakewaker husband settling into their relationship and with Fawn's brother along for the ride as they travel downriver.I really love this world and Bujold's characters. But then when haven't I? I see hints in this series that this might be science fiction as much as fantasy, that this was once our world and the magic might have scientific explanations. The world feels not like a faux medieval Europe, as in so much high fantasy (including Bujold's Chalion) but rather a frontier North America. And Bujold writes strong secondary characters, so her riverboat allows for an interesting mix. Certainly if you liked the prior two books, you shouldn't find this one disappointing. (And if you haven't read the prior books, I guarantee you will be disappointed. See, above. This isn't a book to be read on its own.)
    • 4/5
      Again, it was better when I read it the second time, after I'd read Horizon. Dag's fumbling badly throughout, and seriously confused (and scared) about his new abilities. And the ending is somewhat arbitrary - well, they did start out saying they were going to the sea and that's where it ended. But they're already planning the next thing - stopping at that point is mostly because it wouldn't all fit in one book! Dag uses his abilities a lot, in settings varying from controlled experiments to save-a-life desperate. His choice of action in the latter was interesting, too - paralysis rather than death. Hmmm, they'd found the knife by then - but a lot of people don't share - I don't know. Odd, is all. And - it being a Bujold - there are lots of lovely lines, especially people working past limits. Fun. And better than Legacy - they feel better together, not so dogged.
    • 4/5
      I liked this one better than volume two, though I'm still yearning for a new Vorkosigan novel instead of this fantasy series. But I'll read anything of Bujold's. Has she published a laundry list yet?It's not quite the Montagues and Capulets, but newlyweds Fawn the farmer and Dag the Dunadan oops, I mean Lakewalker, have families that don't get on well. The Lakewalkers patrol the land for the Evil Blight. They have magical powers. They are distrusted and feared by the farmers who they protect, and in turn they hold the farmers in contempt. Will Dag and Fawn effect some reconciliation?In the main action here, our protagonists journey downriver with a motley crew of unhappy youngsters gathered along the way. The boat captain is in search of her lost father and betrothed. There's a nice rhythm of pranks, pie baking and peace, interspersed with some serious bandit fighting action. And it all ends with a day at the sea. Next volume: Horizon. I'll read it.
    • 4/5
      Summary: In the world of The Sharing Knife, Farmers think Lakewalkers are necromantic sorcerers and cannibals, while the Lakewalkers - who spend most of their time hunting and killing the evil life-sucking malices - think that Farmers are little more than dumb animals. That makes the marriage of Dag, a Lakewalker patroller, and Fawn Bluefield, an inquisitive Farmer girl, very unusual indeed. After they've been unceremoniously turned out of Dag's Lakewalker camp, the couple heads out on a mission of their own. Dag's convinced that the centuries-long rift between Lakewalkers and Farmers is causing nothing but problems for both sides, so he's determined that he and Fawn are going to be the ones to bridge the gap and start repairing the misunderstandings. They head south to the river, where they find themselves passage on a most unusual riverboat, with a decidedly motley crew. The boat is captained by a young woman named Berry, who is determined to find out what happened to her father and fiance, who disappeared on the river the year before... although whether by natural causes or something more sinister is yet to be determined...Review: While I've thoroughly fallen in love with both Fawn and Dag, and don't mind any excuse to read more about them, this book didn't quite live up to the earlier books in the series. I think it was because it lacked a single overarching plot and was more episodic in nature - hence my somewhat disjointed attempt at a summary, above. Each episode was certainly interesting, and added to the big picture of the series as a whole, but one didn't always flow smoothly into the next, and the lack of a single motivating story line meant that the whole book felt like "Dag and Fawn float downriver, doin' stuff along the way."But, like I said, at least it was interesting stuff. There are a couple of new turns in the story, and in the character development, that I wasn't expecting but which open up a lot of new possibilities. Bujold also spends a lot of time worldbuilding, as Dag figures out more about how Lakewalker magic really works, and y'all know how much I love a complex and internally consistent magical system. There are several new characters added to the mix in this volume, and I liked most of them almost as much as I like Fawn and Dag - Fawn's brother Whit, in particular, grew on me, as did the young Lakewalker Remo. I also thought that the riverboating aspect of this book was a cool (and very well-detailed) addition to the mix - it's not something you see often as a setting for fantasy novels, and it gave the book a unique flair. And, really, let's be honest: Bujold's got me well and hooked into these characters and this story, so I'll happily read about them doin' stuff for at least another book's worth. 4 out of 5 stars.Recommendation: This one doesn't even come close to standing alone; all of its cool worldbuilding is building on top of what's come before without much recapitulation. But the series as a whole should definitely be of interest to anyone who likes well-developed non-traditional fantasy worlds, and doesn't mind a little romance (really not much at all, at least in this volume) stirred into the mix.
    • 5/5
      This one reminded me of a fantasy version of Huck Finn, if Jim was really a 55 year old white dude, and in love with Huck, who was an 18 year old white woman. But you know, still different cultures so there was still some prejudice issues.
    • 4/5
      Fawn and Dag have left Dag's camp in a self-imposed exile, just ahead of his family forcing the camp counsel to rule his and Fawn's marriage illegal. They gain a traveling companion in Fawn's brother Wit after visitng her family's farm, and all three make their was to a river town, where they meet up with a young female riverboat captain searching for her father and betrothed.This third volume in the Sharing Knife trilogy is much darker. Dag is struggling with what it means for him to be in exile, and he's trying to find a way to help Lakewalkers and farmers get along better, to avoid the prejudice he and Fawn have faced in future.During their travels, they encounter a truly evil Lakewalker, who seems to embody everything Dag could become if he only makes a few ill decisions. He struggles constantly with his new found ground-skills and what they, too, may mean for his soul.Troubling, and exciting, mixed with the wonderful delight Dag and Fawn find in each other's company.Recommended.
    • 4/5
      I received a free copy of Primitive by Mark Nykanen through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. The book was a fast-paced page turner, and would appeal to people who like a good thriller. I t was easy to envision the movie version of this book. The biggest flaw of the book was the political vision, which was a little extreme. The eco-terrorists in the book were forced into violent activity to pursue a worthy agenda, and were compared to John Brown. The government, and everyone working for the government, were all violent and ruthless. This is fine within the context of a thriller where there are "good guys" and "bad guys", but I found it difficult to sympathize with the purported "good guys" in this context.
    • 5/5
      The third installment to a great story. The quality of the writing continues. The fantasy world is expanding and more insights are explained. If you liked for the first two this is more of the same. Looking forward to part 4.
    • 5/5
      Just as savory as her other books. Yum
    • 5/5
      An excellent continuation of the story, as Dag and Fawn travel down a Mississippi-analogue. I eagerly await the fourth and final part.
    • 3/5
      Now this is book number three in a series of quite possible four. I am very fond of Bujold's Miles-books, but the Sharing Knife-series is a bit too romance-y for my tastes. Also they are a bit too slow and taking a bit too many detours along the way. The frame story of Passage is Fawn and Dag taking a boat-trip down-river. Dag gets to get to know farmers better and fawn mainly hangs around. They also pick up a couple of strays, including Fawn's brother Whit, along the way. Now as I was reading the book I contemplated that this book was just like a trip on a slow boat floating down a slow river. Mosly it's calm, occasionally there are rougher parts, but mostly you can sit back, relax and enjoy the scenery as it floats by.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed Passage as much as I did Beguilement, and even more than Legacy. Of course, I do like a good "road trip" story, even when the road trip is actually a river trip.Even though Passage is fantasy, I imagine that the account of pre-industrial river life to be fairly accurate - it was certainly fascinating to me. I also enjoyed the continued development of Dag's abilities, and experimentation with them (complete with bad ideas and consequences).It's also great that Bujold chose to bring back a minor character from an earlier book, Fawn's youngest brother, and make him into a fully-formed character. In the previous book, he didn't seem to have a lot of redeeming qualities, but that was seen though the eye of a younger (much-teased) sister; here, he's quite a valuable member of the team.The main conflict of this book was a little slow to get going, but to me it seemed to mesh with the leisurely life of the river being depicted. And it was certainly exciting once it got going.I'm really looking forward to the fourth and final book.
    • 1/5
      OK, if you read Book 1 and 2 of the Sharing knife series, all you need to do is skim the first half of this book, then read about a quarter of it, then skim the last quarter. Rehash, repetition, repeat.... no surprises, very little to expand the story. If you have not read Book 1 and 2, then you can probably pick this up and read it as a stand-alone. (Yawn). Maybe Book 4 will break out of this cycle and excite me. In case you have read my reviews of the three books in this series and wonder, "why is this person continuing with the series if it is so boring to her?" Well, call me OCD> I am one of those people who cannot NOT finish a book or a series if I can help it.
    • 4/5
      I have a total girl-crush on Lois McMaster Bujold. With every single one of her books, after finishing the last page, I always feel like, “yup! this was a book worth reading!” Why, however, was it a book worth reading? That’s sometimes hard to describe with her books.This is the third in the “Sharing Knife” series, but with the way the plot is structured, a new reader should be able to come into it fairly easily. This time, the emphasis moves from the romance between Fawn and Dag and more into the general realm of relationships between Lakewalkers and farmers, set on a long trip on a barge down a large river. It sounds rather boring, and honestly, there’s not much that sounds compelling in the way of plot. Bujold credits several books in a note at the back, including one by Mark Twain, and that’s honestly what this reminds me of - the rustic dialog, the travelogue feel. And that’s what makes Bujold’s books wonderful - it felt a bit like someone’s memoirs of a real place, and her characters - Dag, Fawn, Boss Berry - act and speak like real people.Except “Boss Berry” kinda sounds like a video game boss, and I kept trying to imagine what a giant evil berry would look like. A strawberry that shoots seeds at you?Anyway, this wasn’t a can’t-put-down book, but more of a leisurely read (though I still read it in one day).