Before I dive into things, it should be noted that, while this looks like I'm reviewing two books, LMB herself said that they should be treated as one, and they definitely feel that way. Also, you should know that here there be spoilers, and that's going to be a thing in all my reviews. If you're looking for a short, spoiler free review, scroll to the bottom for my final thoughts.
Review
This book duped me. Or, maybe, more like, I duped me. If you look to the left sidebar, you'll see that that I sometimes read fantasy romance, but this book came onto my radar when I was fairly certain that I loved fantasy romance. I sought out book series that had good elements of fantasy and romance, picked up this one... then forgot about it for 18 months. By the time I picked it up again last week, I had completely forgotten that that's how I came across it. Regardless, I'm blabbering, let's actually talk about the book.
This book follows Fawn, an 18-year-old girl that has run away from her farm after getting pregnant from a tryst with your local hot-ignorant-and-mean farmboy Sunny Sawfield. The book immediately plunges into the (very) overdone damsel-in-distress trope that leads to Fawn being kidnapped off the road. She is rescued by the magical (and magically handsome) Dag Redwing, and sent back on her way. She then instantly damsel-in-distresses again, and this time when she is rescued Dag, they work together to kill a Malice - a mindless evil creatures that works to take over the world. Fawn is the one who truly kills the malice, but also miscarries in the process.
Now this is where you get tricked. I was lulled gently into the fantasy world that I am familiar with. A short spunky
Mary-Sue heroine (I have fairly strong opinions on Mary-Sues, but that needs to be saved for a post on its own) meets a stoic magical mentor, and they work together to kill a big bad. And it all happens within the first 120 pages of this 900 page two-part tome, great! Plenty of time for them to go through the remainder of the steps - she learns magic, she saves her hometown, he dies heroically, then she defeats all evil in the world. Simple!
Wrong.
I was certainly looking forward to it - Bujold seems to have developed a wild world worth exploring, and I was anticipating the Malice threat to build into epic hunt-and-battle sequences a-la Ninefinger's crew in The Blade Itself.
But I was wrong, because that is not what happens. For a bit, the story still follows the path you expect. The characters, Fawn and Dag, convalesce at a nearby in. And then they keep convalescing. And then they go to a party, and they fall in love, and they meet Fawn's parents and family, and they meet Dag's family and suddenly you're 800 pages into the book and there hasn't been another moment of action since the beginning.
This is what I mean when I say this book tricked me. I didn't realize (or remember, maybe it's better put) until well into the story that I was reading a romance novel, I was simply engaged. Bujold has a way of wrapping me into the characters in a way I wouldn't expect, especially given how trite and overdone the character tropes in this story are. Like, I mean, come on, how many more stories do we need about an older man and a younger woman falling in love in a medieval-Europe inspired landscape and also there's some magic? No, making her eighteen and him fifty-five doesn't make it "a new twist on a classic story," it just kinda makes it a little creepy. Also, don't get me wrong, the world building is relatively deep, but it's not fleshed out. If you plan on reading this book, prepare to read about how the magician's "ground" feels about twenty times per page, without any deeper dive into what ground is, where it comes from, or what the limitations of it are - it exists to drive the plot.
But I kept reading, and reading, because, darn it, I like this story. I feel invested in the characters in a way I have a hard time explaining, even if nothing really does happen. There's just something about romantic descriptions of temperate flora and fauna (heavily splashed throughout the story) and deep character analyses about the difference between knowledge and intelligence that just, grabs me. There's commentary on prejudice and the dangers of hoarding knowledge, all set in a fantasy novel! Where I'm usually looking for a unique world, magic system, or plot twist in these books, here I feel like Bujold has delivered a character story, just setting out that honeypot of "fantasy" to lure in suckers like me.
So my final thoughts: Beguilement and Legacy are perfectly serviceable fantasy novels, but, at the end of the day, they don't really read like fantasy. I'd say they feel like fantasy, but if you're looking for heart pounding action and devastating plot twists, you wont find them here. This is a story about romance, through-and-through. And if you can get past a 37-year age difference (truly a decently-high hurdle), then you might find yourself genuinely enjoying the characters in this story
Thanks for reading!
- Michael
