Reviews

I wasn’t keen on this one originally, because Penric is having a bad time for much of it, and it’s not a cheerful story in general. However, he manages to solve the problem in the end, with the help of his colleagues and his god. So it has a relatively happy ending, except for the mostly anonymous people who die in the course of it; and after repeated rereadings I find that I can accept it as a good story, with the bonus of some new characters.

Penric shares his body with his demon, Desdemona, who has long experience and advanced skills in medicine, and Penric has had medical training himself. However, when he first tried to work as a physician in Martensbridge, he became suicidal from overwork and distress; and decided that medicine wasn’t his calling. That period in his life was skipped over and mentioned only briefly in the series as a whole.

However, this story puts him back in that situation, when an unknown disease starts killing people in his locality, and there’s almost no-one else around to deal with it. His powers and skills don’t seem to be enough: he needs to reach some understanding of the disease, and he needs more help to cope with all the patients. Meanwhile, he begins to suffer again from overwork and distress.

The other stories in the series have mostly been adventures involving travel, plus one or two crime mysteries. This one is unusual in being a medical mystery with no significant travel; and it’s unusually serious in tone, as patients continue to die throughout the story.

The medical mystery seems to me a good one, and it eventually gets solved in a plausible way. All credit to the author for research as well as creativity.

Penric and Nikys now have a baby daughter, who will presumably become more of a character later on, if the series continues for long enough.

kvedja's review

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adventurous emotional tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

aishoka's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

cassandra67b07's review against another edition

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5.0

Starting this fall, I've been making my way slowly through the Penric and Desdemona novellas. They are lovely bite-sized morsels.

This tale is one of the more emotional ones as Penric fights a metaphorical demon--contagion. Bujold faked me out too! I was so sure the fleas/rats angle was the way through but the blue witch mystery was compelling.

I just have a few more to go before the end of the year!

yak_attak's review against another edition

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3.0

In the better half of the Penric novellas, we get a interesting situation with some great tension and the sorcerer and his demon try to get to the bottom of a nascent plague - does it have to do with magical interference? the foreigners in the area? Or something a little more simple? I like the setup, the conclusion, and the characters we're introduced to are solid - but as usual for the Penric novellas it ends up being a little basic for what it could have been. Honestly, this one in particular could've used a substantially darker tone, though I get that's not what Bujold's trying to do here. Instead it's more a rah-rah story of people working together and doing Science. Fun, but not more than that.

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