In which Miles Vorkosigan goes grocery shopping.
It’s a pretty good general go to to take your expert pilot/ warrior/ rogue….etc and make them do something regular. Think: Nebula playing paper football.
There’s a funny scene in this one where Miles is back on Barryar, living on his own for the first time, and having to buy his own groceries. He’s also thinking about what are his non-military, non-spy, non-smuggler career options are. He considers how much money he could make selling eggs — recalling Jeeves’s plan in My Man Jeeves and the plot of Love Among the Chickens, but also predicting the bug venture of Mark in A Civil Campaign.
This book is Miles dealing with the seizures and memory loss he’s experiencing as a side-effect of his cryo-regeneration in the middle of Mirror Dance. In the meantime, we also find out that Simon Ilyan, who has a memory chip installed in his head as head of ImpSec is having issues of his own.
Each Vorkosigan novel is an exercise in pairings and juxtapositions. Here, we get a lot of Miles and Ivan, Miles and Simon, plus various others. Also, we get to spend a lot of time on Barryar for the first time in several novels. This one works because of these pairings, but also because there’s some but very little adventure and action. What this generally means is a lot more politics, a lot more character driven narrative, and greater movement in the meta-arc of the whole series.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Memory-Vorkosigan-Saga-McMaster-Bujold/dp/1476736731/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1558376185&sr=8-1)