Young Miles

The books contained in this omnibus are a lot of fun. It is light reading and very easy to breeze through, heavy on dialogue and humor. There is a mixture of serious storytelling dealing with themes such as oppression and prejudice and light-hearted humor that provides a nice balance between the two.

Miles is an enjoyable character - extremely bright and energetic with a strong mischievous streak. However, the other characters are definitely secondary as Miles always takes center stage with a shining personality that overshadows the rest. His name is in the series title, after all, so I suppose this is not all that surprising.

Complete review:
http://fantasycafe.blogspot.com/2008/08/review-of-young-miles.html

I was a little hesitant to read this before I started it, as I really enjoyed Cordelia in the first collection, and had heard that she had only a minor role in this one. I worried that Miles, her son and the protagonist of this book, wouldn't hold a candle to her.

That lasted around 2 pages. Don't get me wrong, Cordelia's still awesome, but over the course of this book Miles reveals himself to be one of the most entertaining characters I've ever encountered in literature. He's sarcastic, he's charasmatic, he's brash, he always ends up winning - if I knew him in real life I'd probably think he was an ass, but as a protagonist he's perfect.

This book is a collection of two novels and a novella; if you don't realize that, it might seem a bit disjointed, but the three stories work well together, telling the story of Miles becoming a man and overcoming his physical defects by strength of his awesomeness. There are some standard science fiction bits in terms of the plot, but as in the first collection, Bujold really puts the characters on display at the central part of the book (which itself is a bit of a breath of fresh air).