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The Sharing Knife, Volume Three: Passage (The Wide Green World Series Book 3) by [Lois McMaster Bujold]

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Lois McMaster Bujold

The Sharing Knife, Volume Three: Passage (The Wide Green World Series Book 3) Kindle Edition

by Lois McMaster Bujold (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Book 3 of 4: The Wide Green World Series

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“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.

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435 pages
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English
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HarperCollins e-books
Publication date

October 13, 2009
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864 KB
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Nebula and Hugo–winner Bujold explores culture clashes in this compelling third segment of the Sharing Knife series (after 2007's Legacy). Former Lakewalker captain Dag has been exiled from his family for marrying an outsider, farmer's daughter Fawn. Farmers and riverfolk need the secretive Lakewalkers for their ability to manipulate ground energy and battle the deadly blight-causing creatures called malices, but few trust them completely, and the Lakewalkers haven't helped the situation by remaining aloof from the rest of the world. Dag longs to build a bridge of understanding and respect between Lakewalkers and those who depend on their protection. The old ways have worked for better 'n a thousand years, another Lakewalker captain warns, but as farmers settle dangerous territory and Dag's own groundsense abilities develop in dangerous directions, big changes are inevitable. Bujold excels at creating interesting and sympathetic characters, and this story will satisfy readers who enjoy romance as much as adventure. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

From Booklist

The third volume of Bujold’s increasingly popular Sharing Knife series opens with young farmer Fawn Bluefield and her lakewalker husband, Dag, leaving her family’s home to take a trip downriver. After their disagreeable reception from Dag’s family (in Legacy, 2007), Fawn’s family, though nervous and not quite sure how to deal with the new family member, extends a welcome. Dag even agrees to take Fawn’s brother, Whit, along on what is the couple’s working honeymoon. Since meeting Fawn, Dag has realized that farmers and lakewalkers need better working relationships; otherwise, both groups will suffer from habitat disruption. One reason for the trip is for Dag to try talking to farm folk to discover what proposals they will listen to. Heading downriver, Fawn and Dag find plenty of chances to practice diplomacy and healing in both communities and to recover themselves from battle injuries (see Legacy). Bujold extends the series’ portrayal of a pastoral world haunted by ancient ills. The characters are so superbly realized that the reader feels like a fellow passenger on their voyage. In the end, the question of cooperation between communities is still vexedly present, and Fawn and Dag’s journey will continue. --Frieda Murray --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Review

“Compelling . . . Bujold excels at creating interesting and sympathetic characters, and this story will satisfy readers who enjoy romance as much as adventure.”

From the Back Cover

Acclaimed science fiction and fantasy writer Lois McMaster Bujold—five-time winner of the Hugo Award—brings us the third installment in her New York Times bestselling romantic fantasy

The Sharing Knife, Volume Three: Passage

Young Fawn Bluefield and soldier-sorcerer Dag Redwing Hickory have survived magical dangers and found, in each other, love and loyalty. But even their strength and passion cannot overcome the bigotry of their own kin, and so, leaving behind all they have known, the couple sets off to find fresh solutions to the perilous split between their peoples.

But they will not journey alone. Along the way they acquire comrades, starting with Fawn's irrepressible brother Whit, whose future on the Bluefield family farm seems as hopeless as Fawn's once did. Planning to seek passage on a riverboat heading to the sea, Dag and Fawn find themselves allied with a young flatboat captain searching for her father and fiancé, who mysteriously vanished on the river nearly a year earlier. They travel downstream, hoping to find word of the missing men, and inadvertently pick up more followers: a pair of novice Lakewalker patrollers running away from an honest mistake with catastrophic consequences; a shrewd backwoods hunter stranded in a wreck of boats and hopes; and a farmer boy Dag unintentionally beguiles, leaving Dag with more questions than answers about his growing magery.

As the ill-assorted crew is tested and tempered on its journey to where great rivers join, Fawn and Dag will discover surprising new abilities both Lakewalker and farmer, a growing understanding of the bonds between themselves and their kinfolk, and a new world of hazards both human and uncanny.

--This text refers to the hardcover edition.

About the Author

Lois McMaster Bujold is one of the most honored writers in the fields of science fiction and fantasy, having won five Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards. Her second novel, The Warrior's Apprentice, introduced young Miles Vorkosigan, one of the most popular characters in science fiction. In 2011, she was awarded the Skylark Award for her significant contribution to science fiction. The mother of two, she lives in Minneapolis.

Bernadette Dunne is the winner of numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards and has twice been nominated for the prestigious Audie Award. She studied at the Royal National Theatre in London and the Studio Theater in Washington, DC, and has appeared at the Kennedy Center and off Broadway. She lives in Brooklyn.

--This text refers to the audioCD edition.

ASIN : B0010SKSWQ
Publisher : HarperCollins e-books; Illustrated edition (October 13, 2009)
Publication date : October 13, 2009
Language : English
File size : 864 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Not Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 435 pages
Lending : Not Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #139,463 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #3,472 in Epic Fantasy (Kindle Store)
- #5,323 in Romantic Fantasy (Books)
- #6,033 in Epic Fantasy (Books)

Customer Reviews:
232 ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

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Virginia Booklover

Excellent series, my favorite of the four.

Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2017

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About the series:

Bujold is most famous for her science fiction books starring Miles Vorkosigan and his family, and for her "Five Gods" fantasy series (Curse of Chalion etc.). Her Sharing Knife series gets a lot less publicity which I think is unfortunate.

There are numerous online commentors which liken the series to Lord Of The Rings - but as someone who had trouble getting into LOTR, I can state that you will NOT have this problem with the Sharing Knife books. They're set in a very real landscape (along what we know as the Ohio and MIssissippi rivers, though not called that in the book) with civilization for the most part at early 19th century levels - and Bujold's prose is, as always, welcoming and easy to read. You get the sense that there are hidden depths to Lakewalker society, by the frequent reference to "maker's secrets" and a long-departed civilization's cities and bridges, but you're not choked with it the way Tolkein could sometimes do. As well, the "vanquish the ancient evil" here is a long-standing chore that is still ongoing as the series concludes, and the "change society forever" is shown as one person seeing a need, and gradually, in his own small (or not-so-small) way, beginning to effect that change to the benefit of everyone.

It too would qualify as fantasy, though in many ways it's much more accessible than the Five Gods books because there is not the constant dealing-with-deities undercurrent there. In many ways, you could consider this to be a historical adventure series, except there's this thing called "groundsense" and there are these awful creatures called "malices".

The downside of any individual book in this series is that while you could in theory read just one, really you need to read them in order as later events really don't make sense without the background from the earlier books. In fact, Beguilement and Legacy were originally a single book (split into two for length) as were Passage and Horizon.

Passage (the first book) deals with a Lakewalker (Dag) encountering a Farmer (Fawn), and starting the very beginnings of getting the two groups to interact more than they had in the past. It ends with the unthinkable: a Lakewalker and a Farmer marrying. Legacy dealt with Fawn's culture shock being plunged into Lakewalker society, the Lakewalkers' refusal to accept her, and Dag's beginning realization that a) his people don't know it all, b) are unwilling to learn, c) things have to change for everyone to survive in the long run, and d) he's the only one to realize that so he must learn how to change the world.

About this book (Passage):

In Passage, you see Dag beginning his mission of educating Farmers as to what Lakewalkers can do. It's the first time he or any Lakewalker has tried to bring down the veil of secrecy and teach Farmers what Lakewalkers are really all about, it's the first time most Farmers have ever seen Lakewalkers as allies versus terrifying, mysterious sorcerors, and it's the first time Lakewalkers (admittedly, just two of them) are taught to see Farmers as people worthy of respect. Dag also manages to solve one critical problem that has plagued the two groups (beguilement), opening the door for allowing Lakewalkers to provide healing to Farmers - and thereby opening the door for greater interaction between the two groups and greater protection against the malices in the future.

There is some violence in the climactic scene but nothing too bad. There is some blood-and-guts there (literally) but nothing too graphic. The only sex in the book is referred to obliquely - not even remotely graphic. It is by no means a children's book but I'd have no hesitation in letting a 12 year old read it.

4 people found this helpful

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Kindle Customer

good basic read

Reviewed in the United States on June 20, 2020

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I've finished the series so this is an overall review. Overall this is a consistently presented story that will justify spending the money to buy the books. It is not, however, written so as to end up a "classic' 30 years or 200 years from now. The characters are decent, the story pretty good, but this is a basic "tale of the past" in a fantasy world. I would have liked to see more development of characters, but they are not so flat as to be boring. The problem is that one is frequently wondering why farmers exist at all. Nor does it seem to be able to conceive of the idea that lakewalkers and farmers ever intermarried before the current story (as when the empire first collapsed). The solution to farmers' problem is too simple. In all the eons no one thought of that? And of course the usual solution of intermarriage (but what happens if there aren't enough lakewalkers, since the advantage seems to be solely on the side of the farmers. just for once, I'd like to see where the two species can NOT interbreed or where the result is like a mule -- some significant advantages over either parent but not able to pass it on.). The author didn't tread on such dangerous ground.

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randall s morris

Where the series starts getting really good...

Reviewed in the United States on December 22, 2020

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This series was a tough sell for me. I started reading it about fifteen years ago, and abandoned it as an unabashed romance novel with a 19th century kind of setting (I don't have ANY attachment to that era) and an outrageous age gap between the principles. I was and am a huge Bujold fan, but she's a writer with a broad scope so I totally expect that I won't like EVERYTHING she does.

Then came quarantine, and I couldn't afford not to read EVERYTHING I could find by a proven author! The first book felt a little simple and silly, and the second was sad and lonely. This book and the one that follows are where the series starts to get fun and grow into more than just the story of a single romance, and I think I started to recognize a kind of theme... like maybe everything just comes down to family, and the root of a family is two people... or something like that, I don't really know. It's still not my favorite Bujold, it's just way better than I originally thought!

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Karyyl

The title put me off until I was told not to miss these. Delightful action-adventure fantasy.

Reviewed in the United States on April 3, 2021

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This is the best book in this 4-volume travelogue on a very unusual premise. IMO, the best part of the 4. A passage down a river on a flatboat, which is a houseboat with storage for freight. Bujold did very extensive (and probably expensive) research on the early days of the Mississippi in order to truly capture old river culture from the days when the river was an extremely important highway full of the kind of person one calls "characters." The book is not purely sunny, there is danger, love, laughter, tragedy, and heavy-duty learning for all the people on the boat and many they interact with on the way down the river. The setting of the series is a millennium or three after a magical apocalypse, where the population at large has forgotten almost all of what happened so long ago, but there is still dire danger left-over from that destructive event, and the reclusive Lakewalkers, hereditary warriors of the still-dangerous leftover residue, are the only ones who know the important details of the danger and how to fight it. Which causes cultural misunderstanding and occasional clashes between the two groups. The forgotten danger becomes more dangerous BECAUSE it is forgotten. Nearly impossible to put down, even on 3rd reading, this series is truly underestimated, I suspect because the title sounds weird. That put me off for years before my daughter informed me that I was really really missing a great read. So glad she did.

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Fundamentallyflawed

Bujold enters the world of soppy romantic novel

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 23, 2010

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I'm a great fan of Bujold. Her writing is superb, her characters are interesting, rounded and beievable. A Bujold book usually has a plot that is sharp, witty, full of unexpected twists all driven by a rigid internal logic. Normally I can't put one of her books down. I keep them all as they all merit rereading. Not this one though.

I don't know what has got into her with this series. Still excellently written with engaging interesting characters. And a convincing world, and everything following its own internal logic. But this series is soooo long and drawn out. Having read the first three books I'm thinking that all of this would have fitted into the first half of one of her earlier Miles vokosigan and Chalion works. The plot crawls backwards and forwards at snails pace. Bujold has never been afraid of writing about romance but it usually results from the plot, rather than driving it. This time the romantic story seems to be driving the plot, and so far nothing much has happened in the first books that I couldnt have guessed from the first few chapters of volume 1.

I half suspect that her publisher suggested she drag a single book out into a series - after all, now the consumer has to pay for 4 books to find out what happens to these engaging and intersting characters.

Having said all of that, if this book had been written by anyone else I'd be very impressed by the standard of writing, the great characters and the totally belivable dialogue.

One person found this helpful

Nicholas Palmer

Riverboat fantasy

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 9, 2009

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I'm a big Bujold McMaster fan like the first reviewer, but have had the opposite reaction about this series. I liked the first two novels, but found this one heavy going.

Essentially this book of the series has a riverboat theme, with in my opinion a slightly derivative flavor (cf. Huckleberry Finn etc.) - the plot vehicle is the boat moving downstream, and on the way the protagonists meet lots of varied characters of the kind you'd expect to meet in a book about rural America in riverboat days - good folks, suspicious folks, bandits, and so on. There are various relatively minor problems and then a major confrontation. Fen and Dag attract a number of followers as they pursue the difficult job of carving out a middle ground between wary farmers and itinerant patrollers who protect the world from the dangerous malices.

The big strength of the series is that it has a very well-developed concept: all matter has "ground" (essence) and malices are dangerous because they consume the ground of the living and make them into mindless slaves. Patrollers are expert in killing malices and have their own abilities in the manipulation of ground, and the hero Dag is worried that his strength in this area brings him dangerously close to what malices do.

This isn't just a plot artifice: the author is clearly interested in the theme, and the action halts from time to time as the characters debate the issues and speculate about exactly how 'groundwork' can and should be done. I'd assume that volume 4 (which is out, though currently more expensdive than the others) will bring the theme to a conclusion.

So the novel has a lot of the Bujold strengths - sympathetic characters with depth and variety, careful plot, and shades of ambiguity between good and evil. But it's fairly downbeat and slow. I'd read volume 1 first - if you get drawn into the theme, you'll enjoy the others too.

3 people found this helpful

april

nah...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 18, 2017

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slow, plodding, boring...unneccessary sex scenes...

Henk Beentje

Storyteller par excellence hits again!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 5, 2009

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I came to Bujold by way of Miles Vorkosigan, the science fiction series; well, science fiction with a hefty dose of space opera, humor, emotion and plain good storytelling. After finishing that series I went on with everything by Bujold that I could lay my hands on, and so far I have not been disappointed; well, only when I bought Miles novels that had been re-named, and I had read them already. That *was* a disappointment. But the Chalion stuff was great, even if totally different from Barrayar; and the Hallow Hunt was great, too. All five star stuff.

But. The first volume of the sharing knife series (Beguilement) was enjoyable; but I kind of lost interest, for a while. Maybe I overdosed. But I never bought the second one.
And then I read the third one (this one being reviewed, Passage) and it is great; five stars, again, so I will be buying part two, and at the moment I am re-reading part one.

Passage sees our heroes, Dag and Fawn, take a long river trip, as if floating down the Mississippi. Dag is developing his thoughts about his future, and his abilities at the same time. There are plenty of interesting people (Lakewalkers, farmers, boatmen/women) they meet on the way, and some serious evil, too. It is difficult to tell you more without giving the story away! But this is a master storyteller at her peak again, and apart from the twee cover it is a seriously enjoyable book. Recommended for Bujold fans. If you are new to Bujold, you might start somewhere else; say, the Curse of Chalion, or Shards of Honour. I'm sure you'll get to this one, too - not many people read Bujold and are not swept along!

6 people found this helpful

M. W. Broscheit

Die Welten der L. McMaster Bujold.

Reviewed in Germany on July 16, 2018

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Wie einige andere Lesern bin ich vor gut 10 Jahren zuerst auf die deutschen Bände 1 und 2 der „The Sharing Knife“ gestoßen und die liebevoll ausgearbeiteten Figuren, die komplexe Welt und die Geschichte aus der Sicht der beiden so verschiedenen Hauptpersonen hat mir wie fast alle Romane von Bujold gefallen.
Seit ich mir einen Kindle zugelegt habe, gehe ich mehr und mehr dazu über englischsprachige Bücher im Original zu lesen – falls man mal auf unbekannte Vokabeln stößt, helfen die integrierten Wörterbücher schnell weiter.
Da diese Reihe leider nicht den Erfolg wie die Vorkosigan Saga in Deutschland erreicht hatte, sind dann Band 3 und 4 in Englisch auf meinem Kindle gelandet und ich war wieder nach kurzer Zeit an der Seite des Seenläufers Dag und des Bauernmädchens Fawn unterwegs.
Bujold hat die Fähigkeit ihre Figuren und Welten mit Leben zu erfüllen, die Balance zwischen Drama, Humor und auch Romantik zu halten und das Ganze zu einer abwechslungsreichen Story zu verweben.
Band 3 enthält neben vielen kleinen Geschichten, als roten Faden eine Flussfahrt mit einem Lastkahn, wie er vor 150-200 Jahren auf dem Mississippi unterwegs war und dies mit großer Fachkenntnis. Wie Bujold die Details korrekt beschreiben konnte, erklärt sie im Anhang.

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