Negative Positive
Title: A bad soap opera with a political agenda...
Review: I guess I'm in the minority, but I was very disappointed with the second half of this book, the award-winning Barrayar. Shards of Honor was good, although sometimes my suspension of disbelief was challenged, and there were some pretty glaringly amateur areas--the question/answer chapters.But Barrayar was full of cliched characters and plot. Predictable, nauseating. Cordelia is not the same woman she was in Shards of Honor. She is now a self-righteous foreigner who belittles the existing society of Barrayar, and Aral is reduced to a cardboard "Yes Dear" cutout. That really saddened me--he was the best part of Shards. Bujold seems to have expanded her overly-zealous mad-feminist and mommy-hood theme (which made me gag), reveling in pregnancy and birth (I've been there, done that, and can't say I find her story believable). Was it just the milleu of the '80s? It felt anachronistic to me.
Is the review positive or negative? 