A review by secre
Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen by Lois McMaster Bujold

2.0

So when i first read this I marked it as three stars. On my second read, it skimmed four stars. I'm on my third read now and this is the first Vorkosigan novel I've marked as low as two stars. Why? Because to put it quite simply, I found it rather boring. It was a struggle to push through it and that's a first for this universe. It's a nice book, a warm and fuzzy book... and it has nothing that really hooks me and draws me through a novel. Oh, it builds on some characters and gives a little more backstory to snippets of the timeline that we have missed whilst we have been chasing after Miles on his manic travels. But that's all it does really. It's almost as though this is a retirement novel and it just doesn't have the fizz or the sparkle or the wow factor that I have come to anticipate from this series... and indeed this author.

In reality, this is a romance novel in a sci-fi universe and it just doesn't do it for me. It takes the characters and the setting from this magnificent universe and drops them into a fluffy family focussed romantic entity concerned with completing some happily ever stories that got missed first time round. There are some nostalgic references to science fiction aspects like the Prince Serg, but even those were mothballing references. Its just a very different genre of book I suppose and not one that excites me.