Cryoburn Book

The second half of this review contains spoilers for the book. I'll post a warning before we get into them. (Note: this is an actual review for the book--which normally I don't post, as the community norm in romance is that authors don't review books. So don't assume I liked this book less than other books, simply because I say bad things about it. Which is fine--but this is not a romance, and scifi the norms are different. So this is an actual a review.)

So, this book. I have been arguing with myself as to whether this is a four or a five star book, not because I waffle as to how good the book actually is, but because I am not sure which grading scale to use.

I had some worries going into this book. My biggest worry was this: About 10 years ago, I was one of Bujold's natural readers. By this, I mean that the books she was writing were the perfect emotional fit for the books I wanted--no, needed--to read. I've read some of her books literally dozens and dozens of time (Memory, I'm looking at you). But over the last decade that has shifted. I've changed. She's changed. I still enjoy her books, but the last handful haven't caught flame in my heart the way the middle-Miles books did.

So. This book. It's a fast-pace, tightly-plotted Milesian adventure, along the lines of Cetaganda. There's a mystery. There's a pile of cryogenically frozen bodies. And the stakes escalate as the book goes on, from mystery to curiosity to planetary warfare. There's her trademark sense of humor. There's a creepy threat to the Imperium. I enjoyed it.

But this book has a problem, and his name is Jin. Don't get me wrong--I have no problem with kids in fiction. The problem with Jin is that he didn't feel like a child. Or, rather, he didn't feel like a consistently rendered child. (Nikki, on the other hand, always did.) Jin felt like an inconsistently rendered plot device--deeply ignorant, when he needed to ask a question for clarification; and yet profoundly savvy when not.

As an example, Jin (who is twelve) hears that Miles is an Auditor, and assumes that he's an insurance fraud investigator, with Gregor as his boss. Let me point out the ways that this doesn't make sense: At this point, Jin has seen that the Barrayaran consul jumps at Miles's command, that they follow his words as if he were in charge. Jin has seen Miles in action. He's seen the paths that he follows. It simply does not make sense, in light of everything that Jin has seen, that he would persist in the belief that Miles is a glorified insurance salesman, until the very end of the book. Jin is not a stupid twelve years old. He's not a foolish twelve years old. In fact, in my experience, kids--and especially smart kids--are so much less likely to be confused by labels, because they have so many fewer boxes to put things in.

If Jin was too age-stupid in some parts, his emotional concerns felt astonishingly adult-like in others. The way he evaluates Miles-as-father really felt critical in a way that adults are of other adults. In some ways, I felt like Bujold wrote a twelve-year-old child by writing someone like an adult, but with more misconceptions.

This is not to say that Jin ruined the book, but I had a hard time believing he was the narrator when we were in his point of view.

Gripe #2: Ekaterin. I loved A Civil Campaign, but this book just...argh. She's presented as so freaking domestic--and she always was domestic, but--she's so traditional. And that's not out of character for her, but...like I said, argh.

Hence, the four-star review: As a standalone effort, this is a very good book, but one that contained a significant enough flaw that my brain would not turn off in its entirety.

Now we get to the other half of the review. Because there is one way in which this book is unquestionably, undoubtedly, a five-star book.

Here there be Major Spoilers for the last five hundred and three words of the book, so please don't read any farther unless you want to be spoiled.

No. Really. I mean it. DON'T READ ANY FARTHER.








Okay, are you serious about this? Because if you haven't read the book, I don't want to rob it of the emotional impact for you. And you might think you want to be spoiled, but really... you don't.









One of the things I...regret is not the right word. One of the things that makes me wistful about writing romance is the notion that you cannot screw with the Happily Ever After. You don't kill off the spouse of the first couple in the sequel. In fact, in most instances, you show the couple of the prior books off only in order to show their increasing, sickeningly sweet happiness, and their extraordinary fecundity (without, of course, the corresponding sagging body parts).

In some ways, I feel like the extraordinarily rosy future in some ways cheapens the Happily Ever After--as if all the hard work has been done, and so now they may rest on their laurels, content with well-behaved children, estates that produce everything they could want, and milk and honey in every cup forever and ever, and no problems ever threaten the couple.

I don't believe it has to be that way. And this makes me think of what Jo Beverley said at a keynote speech that I heard--that what we should be striving for is not the saccharine happy ending, but a triumphant ending.

On that count, this book delivers. In spades. There is one way that this book is absolutely, without question, a five star review, and that is as an ode for Aral Vorkosigan. This book is a justification for death of the non-cheating variety, as a necessary component of rebirth. And even though she makes you doubt the event in question will happen, during the course of the book, she tells you the truth from the very first line of the book: "Angels were falling all over the place."

If you, like me, have read the earlier Vorkosigan books a billion times, you'll feel the echoes and reverberations throughout.

"They've a right," Miles repeated, wondering why those words seemed to resonate in his mind. He ought to know, but these days he couldn't blame every memory lapse on his own ten-year-old cryorevival.

I remember. It's an echo of what Harra Csurik says to Miles in the Mountains of Mourning, when she comes to Vorkosigan Surleau, seeking justice for her murdered child. And it is Aral Vorkosigan who listens to her, and who tasks Miles with the meting out of justice. But here, instead of it being justice for the parent to the child, it's an inversion, that of justice for the child.

Throughout the book, we are consistently told that Aral Vorkosigan is aging to the point where perhaps emergency treatment, via untested lab results, is indicated. And, with Lord Mark's business interests, Bujold makes us believe, perhaps hope, even that perhaps she's going to cop out on the promise she made once--that the next book in the Vorkosigan series would be about Aral's death. But that hope is Miles's and Mark's--the belief that really, their father cannot die.

And that hope is just a fairy tale.

This book, even if it is ostensibly about planetary politics that are far removed from Barrayar, is about Aral's legacy. There's a weird symmetry to the plot: Miles saves Komarr from off-world invasion of the weirdest and creepiest variety (and think about what that means for Aral's legacy). More than that: it's about an elderly Komarran lady who, instead of being gunned down, turns to the Imperium and thus saves them all.

There are a thousand other cross-weavings.

At the very end, we have an... epilogue, of sorts, entitled "Aftermaths." Not having all my Vorkosigan books easily to hand, I can't check. But I don't believe that any book had an epilogue entitled "Aftermaths." Any book, of course, except Shards of Honor.

And so I embark on the epilogue with that first Aftermaths firmly in mind:
"Don't be afraid," she said. "The dead cannot hurt you. They give you no pain, except that of seeing your own death in their faces. And one can face that, I find."
Yes, he thought, the good face pain. But the great'they embrace it.