Amazon.com info for 'Komarr'

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Back to reviews and details of Komarr

Amazon.com reviews:

Rating: 5 Summary: This is one of the best books of the series!
Comment Favorite books of the Vorkosigan series: Cordelia's Honor, Young Miles, and Komarr; Civil Campaign is a contender. I know, those are compilations, but that's what I read and how they sell them. Komarr probably appeals more to women than to men (unlike others of the series), but then again by now you're so hooked you just want Miles to darn well find a great woman who'll actually live on Barrayar with him! Ekaterin is actually a bit unexpected, she's so quiet and uncertain about herself, that you expect her to be unable to resist Miles' tornado-plus-hurricane way of life, but she's unusually deep and strong. There's a mystery here too for the new Imperial Auditor, but really it's the love story that's the important thing... a love story that continues into A Civil Campaign and Winterfair Gifts.

Rating: 3 Summary: Not Free SF Reader
Comment Suicide is a rather extreme method for getting someone into trouble.


Miles tags along on an investigation that takes place on Komarr. There are some isolations to foil, and a woman to take a fancy too. She is married, but it turns out her ball and chain is more bent than a pig's genitals. Said bloke actually offs himself to try and put the heat on Miles. Not the sharpest tool in the hogcleaning shed, you could say

Throw in a secret weapons plot and it gets a little tricky.

Rating: 4 Summary: A step forward in the Vorkosigan Saga
Comment Lois McMaster bujold has always built her career around her willingness to do the unexpected. Every book up to this point contained big surprises: betrayals, secret identities, surprise attacks, spontaneous plot devices. After a time, you come to understand her method, and you learn to expect the unexpected. But it seems that she expects us to expect the unexpected, and keeps pulling out more stops that we didn't even know were there. So in "Komarr", we have Miles on his first mission as a permanent Imperial Auditor, investigating possible sabatoge on the Komarr terraforming project. You might expect a lot of things from this, but would you ever expect Bujold to turn the book into ... a romantic comedy?

Well, she does, and it's an astoundingly deep comedy at that. Ekaterin Vorsoisson is the unhappy wife of an important bureaucrat. Said bureaucrat has unpleasant jealousies, plus some unfortunate skeletons in his closet that will build up to a mini-climax halfway through the book. But the true surprise is the budding romance between Ekaterin and Miles, which is developed through the same deft twists and turns that Bujold usually employs for the military and political side of her plots.

"Komarr" really is an amazing book, one that delivers enough action to satisfy any fan while challenging us with questions of what makes a marriage work, or not work. A typical fan might accept the diversion into romantic territory or might not, but the book stands out for anyone with a heart and a brain.

Rating: 5 Summary: Miles from the outside - a treat!
Comment This was better than any of the previous Miles novels, from a different point of view than that of the story. The little Vorkosigan from the eyes of strangers lights up some of the darkest details of his everyday life, and the plot concerning rather Ekaterin's life than Miles' is refreshing.

After abandoning the Naismith identity (not too soon, as revealed in "A civil campaign" by the Cetagandan message regarding the issue), Miles threw everything he had into his new "job" of Imperial Auditor. In this persona he comes to Komarr to learn from Lord Auditor Vorthys the secrets of the trade, in a case of mysterious management of the terraformation team. There he meets Ekaterin Vorsoisson, mother of a 9 yr old Nikki that has a genetic disease she's desperate to remedy, and wife of Tien, one of the (soon-to-be-revealed) consirators on the biggest threat to Barrayar's Wormhole to the rest of the universe... Eventually, when push comes to shove, the Vorsoisson family has the stage and Miles can do no more then observe and mop up after.

Ekaterin is beautifully portreyed, finally a full-fleshed-out female character!!, and her view of Miles in action is a great treat. Their incipient love story is enticing and convincing, and the Vorkosigan saga grows richly engrossed by this book!

I enjoyed it enormously! Highly recommended.

Rating: 5 Summary: Rich characterization. Evolving Characters.
Comment Bujold is excellent at providing us with real characters with depth that change over time. This book entails Miles's first foray as a bona fide full time Imperial Auditor. As you might expect, his travels are not uneventful. Bujold is consistently top-notch.