Legacy by Lois McMaster Bujold
It sincerely hurts me to give Lois McMaster Bujold the “DNF,” but I didn’t get very far into The Sharing Knife: Legacy before giving up. It tried it on audio, with the same reader who read Beguilement (see above).
The first scene was a sex scene: Dag (who’s 55 years old) and Fawn (who’s 19) on their wedding night. I rolled my eyes through most of it, and when Fawn started chatting about her family’s propensity to produce twins and other unsuitable topics for a wedding night scene (this is during the act, mind you), I had had enough of Fawn.
Part of the problem is the audiobook reader’s voice — so naive and hickish sounding (though Fawn is actually quite bright) that it grates on my nerves. I thought to myself, “I can’t listen to hours of this,” so I deleted it off my MP3 player and opened the book instead. It was better in print than on audio, but after reading the cover blurbs and flipping through a bit, I realized that again, the focus would be on the romance and Dag’s family’s rejection or acceptance of Fawn. I just didn’t want to go through that again.
Bujold is one of my favorite fantasy authors, but I read her for her lovely writing and amazingly creative magic, not her romance. If you want to read a romance novel, I recommend this series. If not, I don’t.
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“Rock climbing, Joel”
Just ordered it!