Shards was the first of Bujold's novels, and while it's not bad, the rough edges do show. According to one her explanatory essays I read in a prior collection, she wrote it as a romance with science-fiction trapping rather than the other way around, and it shows in the basic plot structure. Girl gets stranded on uncharted planet with boy. Girl takes long walk back to civilization and falls in love. Girl gets captured by monster and rescued by boy. Girl finds that she can't really go home and marries boy.

Okay, maybe it's little more exotic than your typical Nora Roberts fare, and there's more than a dash of action and space politics, but a book of this sort hangs on the characters, and Cordelia is very much a blank slate until she goes home and finds out that her own government wants to use her for propaganda purposes and is willing to brainwash her 'for her own good.' I don't quite buy the romance between Cordelia and the elder Vorkosigan. They're both good, intelligent, career-minded, honorable people, and in the course of the book they're bound together by common crimes, but that doesn't necessarily mean love. And while the rape scene is (thankfully) portrayed as a terrible act by a monster, it isn't nearly as horrifying as it should be. Cordelia may be freaking awesome, but trading witty repartee with a man who is planning to rape and torture you to death is not something that should ever be put to page.

Anyway, Shards is mostly middle-of-the-road, with a few standout moments and one very very dark one. If you're reading the Vorkosigan books you might as well read them all, but The Warrior's Apprentice is definitely the right place to start.