SciFi/Fantasy Novella Review: Knife Children by Lois McMaster Bujold

Knife Children by Lois McMaster Bujold

Knife Children is a novella released just this year by legendary SF/F author Lois McMaster Bujold, acting as a distant sequel to her "The Sharing Knife" fantasy romance series.  I really enjoyed The Sharing Knife, particularly in its central romance between protagonists Dag and Fawn, even if I do think it avoided dealing with certain interesting issues the series brought up.  So you'd think I'd be excited to read this sequel novella.

Unfortunately, the sequel novella doesn't feature the original romantic duo, but instead with side character Barr Foxbrush. And particularly, with a specific aspect of the original series that I found very problematic (and not rare in Bujold's works) - with a supposedly "good" character dealing with the results of his own sexual crimes.  The result is very much what I feared - written excellently with Bujold's usual excellent craft, but in the furtherance of a premise that is, when thought about, INCREDIBLY problematic....at best.


Plot Summary:  12 Years ago, Barr Foxbrush came back from his trip to the sea to discover that his one youthful indiscretion had serious consequences: his use of his Lakewalker powers to seduce a farmer girl resulted in a two year old girl named Lily.  But when the girl's mother demands Barr stay away, Barr was forced to watch the girl from a distance, just in case she manifested Lakewalker powers and needed someone to guide her.  But when Barr returns back from a 2 year patrol in Luthlia to check on Lily, he finds that the girl has gone missing with no clue as to where she's gone.  No one will stand a better chance of finding Lily than Barr, so off he goes, but what he will find in this journey is that the consequences of his actions are even greater than he realized and that no one else can carry out his responsibilities.   

Thoughts:  So let's pretend for a moment not to think about what the premise of this story actually means.  As usual for Bujold, Knife Children is written really well, with great dialogue, excellent plotting and characters who are excellent and easy to root for - aside again from that premise.  I read this as an audiobook, and while the reader is not the same one from the rest of The Sharing Knife series, he's very solid in her stead, so it's not a problem.  There are few writers as good at their craft as Bujold and this is yet another example of that.

But man, we just can't ignore the premise.  It's bad, and it goes as badly as you could possibly expect.  Barr is a rapist.  There's no way around it, he is, he used magical means to influence a girl into sleeping with him, just like a real life guy might've used a Roofie.  Lily's mother not wanting anything to do with him, and lying to her husband about Lily's parentage, makes TOTAL SENSE as a result.  If Barr had asked Dag to watch over Lily, or told someone else to do so, he would be fulfilling his responsibilities while not taking advantage of his crimes, but he only asks them to watch over as a last resort, and the story treats him as right for it.

Still, for a while the novella heads in a direction that I thought could have redeemed this at least somewhat, having Barr take Lily to Dag and Fawn, who could guide her and then help her while keeping her out of Barr's hands, and allowing her mother to be part of her life.  But the plot contrives to stop this, and the end result is Lily winding up staying away from her mother and WITH her rapist father.  Seriously, the end result of this novella is a mother of a child from a rape losing her child to the rapist, and that's the happy ending.

It's not even made better by Lily clearly being her own person.  Lily winds up with Barr because Lily chooses to remain, in part because of her negative feelings toward her mother - who might've treated her unfairly as a result of her parentage, or maybe just was misunderstood by a teenage girl (we never get her mother's side of the story) - in part because of the family Barr can offer her and his training.  But while Lily learns Barr is her father, Barr never tells her that he used his powers to influence his mother in order to seduce her - he leaves that part out.  And that takes all the agency away from Lily, who naturally sees Barr as a white knight instead of who he truly is.

Bujold has a repeated tendency in her novels to feature good guy characters doing immoral sexual acts and then trying to redeem them.  There was Bothari in the Vorkosigan Saga, but Bothari A. raises a daughter whose mother wants nothing to do with and B. pays for his crimes by being shot by said mother.  There was also Mark from the Vorkosigan Saga, but at least Mark is stopped before he actually commits what is basically sex with a child (who has an adult body, to be fair) - a crime that is treated as something for Mark to overcome and justified by Mark's abusive history rather than as something Mark almost did to an innocent child.  So there were some circumstances there were Bujold could sort of pull it off, but there are none here.  This is bad.  Just, no.