“Bujold builds a better fantasy romance with compelling characters and the fascinating clash between their cultures, she a farmer’s daughter, he an adventurer on the trail of a deadly demon.”— Locus One of the most respected writers in the field of speculative fiction, Lois McMaster Bujold has won numerous accolades and awards, including the Nebula and Locus Awards as well as the fantasy and science fiction genre’s most prestigious honor, the Hugo Award for Best Novel, four times (most recently for Paladin of Souls ). With The Sharing Knife series, Bujold creates a brand new world fraught with peril, and spins an extraordinary romance between a young farm girl and the brave sorcerer-soldier entrusted with the defense of the land against a plague of vicious malevolent beings. Meet Fawn Bluefield and Dag Redwing Hickory in Beguilement , the first book in Bujold’s unforgettable four-volume fantasy saga, and witness the birth of their dangerous romance—a love threatened by prejudice and perilous magic, and by Dag’s sworn duty as Lakewalker patroller and necromancer. Adult/High School–Bujold's The Curse of Chalion (2001) and The Hallowed Hunt (2005, both Morrow/Avon) walked a fine line between fast-paced quest fantasy and character-driven romance. Here the fantasy is in the background, making the developing romance between the main characters, Dag and Fawn, the primary story. The two meet when the wandering adventurer Dag rescues the farmer's daughter Fawn from a Malice, a powerful demonic creature capable of bending the wills and flesh of others to itself. While there is action and drama, the end result is that the events seem built for the singular purpose of pushing Dag and Fawn together instead of moving along any other plot thread. This is a big shift for Bujold's fans, who might expect layers of political intrigue and thrilling action alongside the love story. Fortunately, the lovers are compelling characters, and Bujold delivers a novel that is a sweet, touching, and fast read. While it seems difficult to imagine how a love story can carry a whole fantasy series, teens will want to see how this tale continues in the next volume. –Matthew L. Moffett, Ford's Theatre Society, Washington, DC Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Beguilement launches the Sharing Knife, a new multivolume adventure and love story. Unmarried, pregnant Fawn Bluefield leaves her family's home, preferring the anonymity of the city to family squabbling and village nattering. En route, she is captured by dark magic. Dag, a sorcerer-soldier of the Lakewalkers, rescues her, and the battle to do so inaugurates a bond between them. The Lakewalkers are a people with power whose skills are feared and respected by the farming communities. Fraternization between them and the farmers is considered improper and unlucky by both peoples. Fawn and Dag, coming to know each other, must decide whether to build on their bond and thereby flout custom and the loudly expressed disapproval of both sets of kin or to try to break the bond, with possible ill results for each of them. Bujold draws Fawn's world proficiently as she ineluctably draws the reader into the protagonists' quandaries, those of a adult team leader and widower, on the one hand, and a girl who got pregnant through romantic foolishness, on the other. Bujold develops the characters and their relationship skillfully enough to please romance as well as fantasy fans. Frieda Murray Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved “A quiet, beguiling and transcendent tale of love, mystery and magic...The main characters are...complex and beautifully written.” - Romantic Times BOOKclub Young Fawn Bluefield has fled her family's farm hop-ing to find work in the city of Glassforge. Uncertain about her future and the troubles she carries, Fawn stops for a drink of water at a roadside inn, where she encounters a patrol of Lakewalkers, enigmatic soldier-sorcerers from the woodland culture to the north. Fawn knows the stories about the Lake-walkers: they are necromancers; they practice black sorcery; they have no permanent homes and own only the clothes they wear and the weapons—mysterious knives made of human bone—they carry. What she does not know is that the Lakewalkers, as a whole, are engaged in a perilous campaign against inhuman and immortal magical entities known as “malices,” creatures that suck the life out of all they encounter, and turn men and animals into their minions. Dag is an older Lakewalker patroller who carries his past sorrows as heavily as his present respon-sibilities. When Fawn is kidnapped by the malice Dag's patrol is tracking, Dag races to rescue her. But in the ensuing struggle, it is not Dag but Fawn who kills the creature—at dire cost—and an uncanny accident befalls Dag's sharing knife, which unex-pectedly binds their two fates together. And so now the misenchanted knife must be retu