Lois McMaster Bujold: Shards of Honor

This is one of 2 prequels to Miles Vorkosigan stories but my second time around, I wanted to start at the beginning. And it's been quite a while since I read the Vorkosigan saga.

This is the story of Miles' parents meeting and falling in love. :)

Btw, I love it when reading a book makes me come to a whole bunch of realizations, one of which is also that by the time I write the review, I forget some, get some new ones, and forget to write some of those down too in the post. :) But then again, I never said my mind was organized.

One of the realizations was the fact that I read for fun and thrills. What I mean is, that the story can be made interesting and breath-taking (reading without breathing much) and the love story can develop and characters not even to kiss well after they both know they are in love. And the best thing? It wasn't even the kiss that was thrilling - it was all the dialogues that came before and after. :)

One of the more disturbing realizations was, what was I doing when reading this for the first time?! It's normal to forget parts of the story, I just can't remember everything after one reading, but I seem to have missed quite a lot of underlying hints too, looking in retrospect. And I'm not sure I can blame it all on the Croatian translation (as this series was translated into Croatian) and that's how I read it originally. That was quite some time ago so I decided to do it again, only this time in original. And I'm glad I did. You always lose something in translation, it's normal. Now, I'm enjoying myself fully.

It is such an intelligently written book and if you don't pay attention, you can actually get lost in both the dialogues and underlying politics. It certainly engages the mind while giving it a thrilling science-fiction ride.
And even though the stories revolve around warfare and the Barrayar society is based on military basics, this book and the whole series is actually a strong voice against was, aggression and bloodshed.

I highly recommend this to anyone even slightly interested in either fantasy or science-fiction. You won't regret it. Especially after Miles enters the scene. :)