Reading: Mirror Dance

[white_hart]

After 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.

Comments

[white_hart]

I am a bit nervous about A Civil Campaign, because I don't get on with romance in general and the Aral/Cordelia romance in Shards of Honour is the reason it took me a long time and multiple tries to get into the series...

[clanwilliam]

When I first read A Civil Campaign, I’d borrowed a friend’s copy. They all waited around at Reading train station until I finished it. It also has a massive empathy embarassment scene that hits every button for those of us who suffer from it and that scene still manages to be hilarious. And you will have a crush on several Koudelka siblings by the end. As well as Aunt Alys.

[antisoppist]

A Civil Campaign has lots of excellent people in it and is worth it for that but hell none of them are Miles trying to do relationships. And after the first reading, I tend to skip That Bit.

[alithea]

It's a Mark centred romance, I suspect you'll have less issues with it than Aral/Cordelia. Although I loved Aral/Cordelia so am not the best judge... But they do meet under much more equal terms.

[white_hart]

I love both Aral and Cordelia (especially Cordelia) as people, and I like their relationship once it’s established. I just didn’t like their initial romance at all!