A review by lizbusby
The Physicians of Vilnoc by Lois McMaster Bujold

4.0

I'm sure the publisher had no idea when selecting May 2020 as a publication date for this fantasy-world epidemic that the world would be two months into a pandemic. Irony that. But if anyone can pull off an optimistic pandemic book, it's Bujold's characters Penric and Des. The struggles that Penric goes through in the book hit much harder given all that I've heard in the past two years about the struggles of medical personnel during the pandemic and all the hard choices they had to make. Additionally, I enjoyed the interaction between the Five Gods magic system and the germ theory of disease. Given that science is not there yet in this world, it was interesting to see how much the magic enabled Penric to guess, but without falling into the trope of getting all of modern medicine right so it doesn't feel authentic to the world around him.

And now I'm all caught up in my Penric & Desdemona re-read and ready for the new novel!