Well, that was a disappointment. I’m not sure what’s going on with Bujold, but her recent books have been well off her peak. Beguilement is essentially a romance novel disguised as a fantasy, and nothing happens for three-quarters of the book. It’s front-loaded: at the beginning, we get a lot of fantasy-adventure, and the rest of it (all three hundred pages) consists of the protagonists falling in love and having sexual escapades. I wonder why this wasn’t a standalone novel; it’s plain that Bujold wrote most of this book as filler, and given its modest length (360 pages) it seems unlikely that the book would have been “too long” if it were printed as one volume. It’s a shame. The characters are likeable and the world is interesting, but I can’t muster any enthusiasm for the the second volume.