Books like The Spirit Ring

I was all set to treat this as you would any consistently entertaining, young adult type fantasy novel, until you get to the scene that would probably win the category (and be the only nominee) for Best Use of Stillbirth in a Fantasy Setting. I sure as heck didn't see THAT coming.Lois Bujold gets tons of raves from the SF community (she's certainly won quite the handful of awards) and for some reason I've only read one of her Vorkosigan books, something I'll probably rectify soon. This, on the other hand, was the first fantasy novel from her and there's not too many authors that can make the crossover from one genre to the other and back again, at least not without ticking off one of your possible audiences. The SF fans probably don't want to see their books suddenly populated with dragons and the fantasy fans probably aren't looking forward to too many visits from Captain Science.So, how'd she do? Not bad, from the looks of it. The tale itself is fairly basic from a plotting standpoint, nominally about a girl's coming of age in a time that appears to be the Middle Ages, and in the midst of a local mercenary putting the moves on her city-state by deciding it was ripe for the taking The references to real-life places is a little off-putting at first, considering how much magic is being tossed about casually, but what impressed me was how well she integrated the fantasy stuff into the realistic setting without turning it into some kind of steampunk pastiche. As her notes at the end of the book will explain, she based part of the tale on an old folk tale and our heroine's father on famous sculptor and bisexual Benvenuto Cellini and the real-life underpinnings help anchor the story because everyone just accepts thing like spirit rings and girls who can set stuff on fire as just The Way Things Are. It also seems like Bujold took the scientific approach and worked out the mechanics of magic, what it can do, what it can't do and more importantly for this time period, what role religion and the church has in it (this is a bigger deal than it would seem, since everyone in the story is fairly religious). With the ground rules set, it becomes easier to color within the lines since she's not worried about discovering the framework on the fly.None of this is ingredients for a masterpiece, but it is the oil that greases the gears of a well-told story and if nothing else it's amazing to see how easily all the various moving parts of the story all fit together easily. There's very few loose ends, even seemingly random asides wind up becoming important, even vital later. When the heroine comments toward the end that victory was possible only because everyone worked together, she could be commenting on every aspect of the book itself. As a story it's all seamless and there's hardly any feel that you're being "told" a story as much as watching events unfold in the only logical fashion, which is at least the sign that you're in the hands of a professional.As for the story itself, it's fun. It's certainly not attempting to masquerade as an epic and as such probably isn't going to change your life. Fiametta is a teenager apprenticed to her famous father, who only wants the chance to do magic and find her true love. When all heck breaks loose as mercenaries take over the town and the body count starts stacking up, including people she knows, she has to learn a lot of really important things very quickly. Fortunately that true love showed up. Thur Ochs is that lad and while the story is supposed to be Fiametta's, he gets so much time devoted to his escapades that you wonder if the book is really about him after all. It hardly matters. In a tale as well told as this, you can almost submerge any hints of characterization and be able to coast on the plotting, even if none of it would be very memorable when finished. But Bujold does flesh out her characters and give them odd angles, even if these people are ultimately archetypes, they're not only inhabiting them completely but doing it very well. It's a pleasure to read about them and they're so decent that you're basically rooting for their victory and for them (although the outcome of the romance is such a given that there's hardly any sexual tension, although if that's what you came here for a fantasy novel may not have been the first place to try). In fact, all the good guys are decent folks while the villains are hissably bad. And it never becomes a problem.This is a book you power through in a number of hours and while I want to keep docking points for simplicity, I can finding nooks and crannies in the book I didn't expect: the abbot's complex relationship with magic, the alluded to backstory of the father, the sweetness of two decent people coming together in the midst of chaos, the woman who donates her milk for a higher cause, the rules of the kobolds. There's enough raw material in here to tell a dozen stories in this setting and yet it never feels like it's skimming the surface. It's as deep as it needs to be and any complaining seems more like nitpicking after a while. So instead of looking for things it does wrong I'll point out that it does nearly everything right (except for that cover, which appears to have a giant ring with a face fleeing from the thing from "Alien") and doesn't insult our intelligence. And in a genre that often says you can't mingle if you don't have elves or a trilogy attached to your name, we should just be glad exists at all, and that it's good.