Another Miles Vorkosigan book with a Hugo award. The main protagonist of this book isn’t Miles himself, but his clone brother, Mark. Miles himself spends most of the book as dead, as he is shot when he tried to rescue his clone brother from a mess he had gotten himself by posing as Admiral Naismith, who is an alter ego of Miles. Luckily, Miles was packed in a cryochamber soon after his death, so it is supposed to be possible to revive him. Not so luckily the cryochamber then went missing in the heat of the battle. The book is a story of the personal growth of Mark and how he comes to accept himself and his place in society and how is overcomes the harsh upbringing he had while he was trained as an assassin to destroy Miles and Miles’s family.
A pretty good book – not the best of the series though – there was too little Niles. The writing was good and readable as always. The beginning of the book was somewhat slow when compared with the last quarter when the pace was even too fast and Mark seemed to grow up very suddenly. On the other hand what he faced was something really unusual and unnerving, which could have totally wrecked any man with less personal strength. By the end of the book Mark turns out to be an interesting and well described character – something he really wasn’t in the “Brother’s in Arms”.
592 pp.
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