An engaging and sometimes humorous set of tales, further episodes in the life of the Learned Divine Penric and his demon Desdemona.

(See Penric's Progress for information on the series as a whole, and on Bujold's style.) ( )

This book is a set of three novellas (Penric's Mission, Mira's Last Dance, The Prisoner of Limnos) continuing the saga of Penric and his demon, Desdemona ~ an adventure that began in the collected stories of Penric's Progress (Penric's Demon / Penric and the Shaman / Penric's Fox).

These collected works are very satisfying works which flow together without exactly following immediately in time. The stories are tight, immediately engaging, and the characters well-developed, growing and changing over the years that are covered. There are different characters that dominate the specific story which adds a pleasant depth to the world Bujold created with the Five Gods Universe.

While the adventure and suspense is light, the stories are very satisfying in terms of human relations and emotions. The intensity of the Chalion stories is absent and the fierce battles less of a theme. For pandemic reading the two omnibus collections completely filled my reading requirements. ( )

(Review of both Penric collections together.)

Bujold's great strength has always been the ability to engage the reader's interest early and strongly in the central character she is tracking, and that ability is on full display here.

There's not a lot of new worldbuilding at the foundational level. Where the three novels set in the Chalionverse were centred around the Daughter, the Bastard, and the Son, this set of stories is well within the ambit of the Bastard; we learn little new of the Mother or the Father, or even of the other gods. At a less foundational level, there's lots of new detail of polities not previously seen in a time not previously visited. (Desdemona has a lot of mundane memories from previous sorcerers, but demons do not seem to have knowledge of their prior world, or if they do they do not share them.)

Looking back, most of Bujold's major works, the peaks, involve a thoroughgoing change of life for her characters - Cordelia is going through one in Barrayar, Miles in Memory, Miles and Ekaterin in Komarr/A Civil Campaign, Mark and Miles in Mirror Dance, and the same is true of the central characters in the three Chalionverse novels. Here, only the first story really fits that mold (for all that Penric does move around, his essential function and identity are not subsequently challenged). Some of the people he interacts with are going through life-changing experiences, but only one of them is reasonably central, and a viewpoint character, and that change is set firmly within the context of a romance story arc.

The fates of no empires lie in the balance. Rulers are off to one side, occasionally encountered, never central. These stories are deliberately limited in scope, with traits of mystery, espionage, and romance as generic markings in many cases.

On the other hand, they make pleasant pandemic reading, short visits to another place with different concerns, written to a human scale. ( )