Or, rather, he didn't feel like a consistently rendered child. The problem with Jin is that he didn't feel like a child. Don't get me wrong-I have no problem with kids in fiction. I enjoyed it.īut this book has a problem, and his name is Jin. And the stakes escalate as the book goes on, from mystery to curiosity to planetary warfare. There's a pile of cryogenically frozen bodies. It's a fast-pace, tightly-plotted Milesian adventure, along the lines of Cetaganda.

I still enjoy her books, but the last handful haven't caught flame in my heart the way the middle-Miles books did. But over the last decade that has shifted. I've read some of her books literally dozens and dozens of time ( Memory, I'm looking at you). By this, I mean that the books she was writing were the perfect emotional fit for the books I wanted-no, needed-to read. My biggest worry was this: About 10 years ago, I was one of Bujold's natural readers. I have been arguing with myself as to whether this is a four or a five star book, not because I waffle as to how good the book actually is, but because I am not sure which grading scale to use. Which is fine-but this is not a romance, and scifi the norms are different. So don't assume I liked this book less than other books, simply because I say bad things about it. (Note: this is an actual review for the book-which normally I don't post, as the community norm in romance is that authors don't review books. I'll post a warning before we get into them. The second half of this review contains spoilers for the book. Bribery, corruption, conspiracy, kidnapping-something is rotten on Kibou-daini, and it isn’t due to power outages in the Cryocombs. Here he finds a young boy with a passion for pets and a dangerous secret, a Snow White trapped in an icy coffin who burns to re-write her own tale, and a mysterious crone who is the very embodiment of the warning Don’t mess with the secretary. On Kibou-daini, Miles discovers generational conflict over money and resources is heating up, even as refugees displaced in time skew the meaning of generation past repair.

But when a Kibou-daini cryocorp-an immortal company whose job it is to shepherd its all-too-mortal frozen patrons into an unknown future-attempts to expand its franchise into the Barrayaran Empire, Emperor Gregor dispatches his top troubleshooter Miles to check it out. Barrayaran Imperial Auditor Miles Vorkosigan can hardly disapprove-he’s been cheating death his whole life, on the theory that turnabout is fair play. Kibou-daini is a planet obsessed with cheating death.

Cryoburn