The Sharing Knife: Beguilement by Lois McMaster Bujold

I was looking up some of the Vor books at my favorite book store and found this. I don't think I have ever read anything by Bujold except the Miles Vorkosigan books (assuming you count the Cordelia books in that category). Well, maybe one title seemed familiar - although I couldn't remember too many details of the story. There aren't very many of them, but they are there.

This is fantasy, the Vor are definitely science fiction. It is genuine fantasy, not pseudo science fantasy like McCaffrey's Pern books or Shinn's Samaria books which start as high fantasy and then run back to technology to justify everything. That isn't a put-down - I love those books and have reread them many times. There is something different about building a fantasy context and letting it stand on its own. Of course, I have only read the first one of these (there are four), so I may be leaping to a conclusion.

It is difficult to find a term to characterize this book - I was delighted to discover the term "cozy mystery" for that subgenre - and maybe such subdivisions exist for fantasy, but I haven't encountered them. Perhaps it would suffice to say that it is "gentle" fantasy - although there is plenty of gore and grim and fell monsters.

The setting is reminiscent of the rural midwest of about a century ago, with the addition of the "others," the lakewalkers, who have an ability in addition to the usual five senses which they call "groundsense" and appears to be an awareness of the "rightness" of things as well their location within a range that varies from one individual to another as hearing does. The lakewalkers are perhaps similar to the plains tribes, except that their mission is to eradicate an ancient evil which surfaces apparently at random threatening human settlements, not to mention the existence of life on earth in general.

In this story, a lakewalker rescues a "farmer" girl a) from a would-be rapist, b) from one of the primordial monsters, and c) from death of her injuries, and, predictably, they fall in love - with all the problems associated with cross-cultural alliances. I assume that their story continues in the next book, because they haven't quite crossed all the bridges yet.