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A review by bookcraft
A Civil Campaign by Lois McMaster Bujold
4.0
This has got to be my nearly most favorite of the Vorkosigan books. ;-) I love almost every single aspect of it, and it would've handily won five stars from me except for a single thing that really bothered me.
I could buy it if perhaps the job had been for another Vor lord (or for Gregor), and Miles had a secret hand in getting her the job; that would be a more accurate parallel to the cross-ball story. Alternately, a more accurate parallel to the existing situation with Ekaterin would be the nepotism that granted Miles the temporary Auditor status despite his inexperience and the fact that he didn't ask for the position. Or, for that matter, you could use as a parallel any of the various instances of nepotism throughout the book, most of which Miles doesn't actually ask for but which he accepts. There's what feels to me a subtly sexist underone there: when Miles is handed something through luck or nepotism, he proves himself retroactively deserving and thus entitled to it. When Ekaterin is handed something through nepotism, she is "lied to" and it doesn't matter whether she proves herself deserving of it in the end, because she didn't do the earning of it beforehand.
And actually, I disagree that she didn't do the earning of it beforehand. None of the lead-up to the (terrible! Vorkosigan men are abysmal at asking people to marry them!) proposal, not even those from Miles's POV with plenty of his internal machinations shown, indicate that he was in any way giving Ekaterin something he believed she lacked the proven skill to earn. It would be different if we hadn't seen from the very beginning, long before Miles actually fell in love with her, that he admired her garden design, thought her talented, and had even thought about how her traditional Barrayaran garden design would make a lovely and history-embracing feature back home. She may not have gone to school for it, but between her real-world gardening and her virtual designing, she had all the skill and experience she needed (barring, perhaps, real-world business experience) to do the job.
I'm not saying that all aspects of his plan to woo her were without problems, but that aspect in particular—and the criticisms that were leveled at it within the text—was presented in a way that bothered me.
Wow, that was...longer than I expected. Apparently I have really strong feelings about it?
Overall, I loved all the political intrigue and reveled in the way the most awful people got their comeuppance, usually dealt to them as a fairly direct result of their own machinations. The callbacks to earlier books (Kou and Drou and the couch!) were wonderful, Ivan's further character development was a delight, the Betan portion of the solution to the Vorrutyer situation was both thoroughly unexpected (though I half-called the reveal at the very end) and a pleasant surprise, and I honestly cackled in glee more times than I can count.
Special note regarding the audiobooks: The narrator (Grover Gardner) has grown on me, but the inconsistency in how he pronounces names and places (between different books in the series, mostly, though occasionally within the same book) is a little jarring.
Spoiler
While I absolutely support Ekaterin's right to her feelings and reactions one hundred percent, and I think Miles is frequently a ginormous ass, albeit usually not with malicious intent, I have a lot of problems with the way their central fight was presented. Cordelia (whom I usually adore virtually unreservedly) really missed the mark when she compared Miles's garden project for Ekaterin with his own childhood cross-ball game experience. The idea that secretly allowing someone an undeserved win in a competitive sport is the same as hiring an unproven but admittedly talented person (whom you happen to be in love with) to do a job they've never before done is a false parallel.I could buy it if perhaps the job had been for another Vor lord (or for Gregor), and Miles had a secret hand in getting her the job; that would be a more accurate parallel to the cross-ball story. Alternately, a more accurate parallel to the existing situation with Ekaterin would be the nepotism that granted Miles the temporary Auditor status despite his inexperience and the fact that he didn't ask for the position. Or, for that matter, you could use as a parallel any of the various instances of nepotism throughout the book, most of which Miles doesn't actually ask for but which he accepts. There's what feels to me a subtly sexist underone there: when Miles is handed something through luck or nepotism, he proves himself retroactively deserving and thus entitled to it. When Ekaterin is handed something through nepotism, she is "lied to" and it doesn't matter whether she proves herself deserving of it in the end, because she didn't do the earning of it beforehand.
And actually, I disagree that she didn't do the earning of it beforehand. None of the lead-up to the (terrible! Vorkosigan men are abysmal at asking people to marry them!) proposal, not even those from Miles's POV with plenty of his internal machinations shown, indicate that he was in any way giving Ekaterin something he believed she lacked the proven skill to earn. It would be different if we hadn't seen from the very beginning, long before Miles actually fell in love with her, that he admired her garden design, thought her talented, and had even thought about how her traditional Barrayaran garden design would make a lovely and history-embracing feature back home. She may not have gone to school for it, but between her real-world gardening and her virtual designing, she had all the skill and experience she needed (barring, perhaps, real-world business experience) to do the job.
I'm not saying that all aspects of his plan to woo her were without problems, but that aspect in particular—and the criticisms that were leveled at it within the text—was presented in a way that bothered me.
Wow, that was...longer than I expected. Apparently I have really strong feelings about it?
Overall, I loved all the political intrigue and reveled in the way the most awful people got their comeuppance, usually dealt to them as a fairly direct result of their own machinations. The callbacks to earlier books (Kou and Drou and the couch!) were wonderful, Ivan's further character development was a delight, the Betan portion of the solution to the Vorrutyer situation was both thoroughly unexpected (though I half-called the reveal at the very end) and a pleasant surprise, and I honestly cackled in glee more times than I can count.
Special note regarding the audiobooks: The narrator (Grover Gardner) has grown on me, but the inconsistency in how he pronounces names and places (between different books in the series, mostly, though occasionally within the same book) is a little jarring.