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Reading: Mirror Dance
Jan. 13th, 2019 10:09 amAfter not really enjoying Brothers in Arms it has taken me a while to get back to reading Bujold. I wasn't actually planning to read Mirror Dance, but on Monday I discovered while on the bus to work that after nerving myself up to read Children of Time despite it being about spiders I didn't actually own it, and I couldn't just buy a copy there and then as my kindle is wifi-only and doesn't like eduroam, so I wouldn't have been able to download it until I got home. I was definitely in the mood for space opera, and trying to look up synposes and decide on which of the completely new to me books on my kindle I should go for seemed like too much work for 6:20 on a Monday morning, so picking up the next in a series seemed like the logical thing to do.
Mirror Dance is set a couple of years after Brothers in Arms; it alternates point of view between Miles and his brother Mark, although Miles is missing in action (literally) for a lot of the book. I struggled a bit to get into it, and actually nearly abandoned it about a fifth of the way through, at which point it had been pretty much all action sequences and bad decisions and things going terribly wrong and I wasn't sure if I wanted to carry on. I even picked up another book instead, but went back to Mirror Dance later that day, and by yesterday I found that I was completely absorbed by it and read about the last three-quarters of the book in two sittings.
I think, really, that I'd been coming at the book the wrong way. The early Miles books had set me up to expect a space-opera romp: fun, some mild peril, possibly some unpleasant-but-not-terminal violence and the regrettable deaths of a few redshirts. Mirror Dance is not a space opera romp; it's a complicated, serious novel about identity and consequences which just happens to be set in space (and on non-Earth planets). I was really struck by how much the structure and imagery echoes the mirror theme; there are lots of actual mirrors, and lots of moments which mirror back thoughts and actions from earlier in the novel (and I think from earlier books in the series, too - the central section seemed to echo Barrayar in places), which made me wish I had a paper copy and not a kindle edition so I could easily flick back and forth to check. I liked it a lot, but it wasn't the uncomplicated read I was expecting, and I think I'll need to approach the later books in a slightly different frame of mind if I want to get the most out of them.
Mirror Dance is set a couple of years after Brothers in Arms; it alternates point of view between Miles and his brother Mark, although Miles is missing in action (literally) for a lot of the book. I struggled a bit to get into it, and actually nearly abandoned it about a fifth of the way through, at which point it had been pretty much all action sequences and bad decisions and things going terribly wrong and I wasn't sure if I wanted to carry on. I even picked up another book instead, but went back to Mirror Dance later that day, and by yesterday I found that I was completely absorbed by it and read about the last three-quarters of the book in two sittings.
I think, really, that I'd been coming at the book the wrong way. The early Miles books had set me up to expect a space-opera romp: fun, some mild peril, possibly some unpleasant-but-not-terminal violence and the regrettable deaths of a few redshirts. Mirror Dance is not a space opera romp; it's a complicated, serious novel about identity and consequences which just happens to be set in space (and on non-Earth planets). I was really struck by how much the structure and imagery echoes the mirror theme; there are lots of actual mirrors, and lots of moments which mirror back thoughts and actions from earlier in the novel (and I think from earlier books in the series, too - the central section seemed to echo Barrayar in places), which made me wish I had a paper copy and not a kindle edition so I could easily flick back and forth to check. I liked it a lot, but it wasn't the uncomplicated read I was expecting, and I think I'll need to approach the later books in a slightly different frame of mind if I want to get the most out of them.
