Horizon
The Sharing Knife, Vol. 4
Lois McMaster Bujold

Harper Voyager / HarperCollins Publishers
October 2011/ ISBN: 978-0-06-137537-8
Epic Fantasy
Amazon

Reviewed by P.L. Blair

Horizon Continues Compelling Saga

Volume 4 in Lois McMaster Bujold's Sharing Knife series is as compelling as the books that precede it. Perhaps more so as the reader becomes increasingly entwined in the lives and hopes and dreams of the Lakewalker, Dag Redwing Hickory Bluefield, and Fawn Bluefield, the farmer girl he never expected to fall in love with.

Not quite fitting in either the Lakewalker or farmer world, the pair have made their own family - a flatboat boss and her family, Fawn's younger brother Whit, two Lakewalker patrollers… All their lives complicated as Dag - who never anticipated being more than a Lakewalker patroller - discovers unsuspected powers for making and healing.

Besides trying to integrate, and make sense of, these til-now un-guessed aspects of himself, Dag is also trying to reconcile the two worlds of farmer and Lakewalker, both sides human but mutually distrustful. Only Dag and Fawn, it seems, recognize that each side has something to offer the other - and that each needs the other in an ongoing battle against a greater enemy, an inhuman foe that can destroy farmer and Lakewalker alike.

In Horizon, Bujold once again proves herself a master at characterization … plot … emotion … and the careful weaving of suspense. Not only Dag and Fawn but the lesser characters in her book - the healer Arkady, Lakewalkers Remo and Barr, Whit Bluefield - are fully formed; vivid, memorable. These are people who rapidly become friends, family. People you care about.

This is a Keeper - one of those books you'll read again and again, and each time you read it, you will feel the same emotions, the same bone-chilling terrors that gripped you the first time.

Bujold is that good.

If you haven't yet read the first three books in this series, don't worry. Bujold provides enough background information so that you won't miss the high points. But I strongly recommend that you read the first three books - if not before Horizon, then after. Dag's and Fawn's story is one you don't want to miss.

Reviews of other titles in this series

Beguilement, No 1  [review]
Legacy, No 2
Passage, No 3  [review]
Horizon, No 4  [review 1 ]

Reviewer's Note: Adult themes