The Vorkosigan saga is a lot heavier on the science fiction than Bujold's Sharing Knife series is, which for me always makes a book harder to sink into. Even so, Bujold does a very nice job of pulling the reader into this strange and unfamiliar world. She also knows how to handle serial novel writing well - I was somewhat worried I'd feel lost reading this, as it's well into a series I've never read, but the author does an excellent job of casually referring to past events without alienating a reader unfamiliar with the characters' history. It could just as easily have been a stand-alone novel in which the characters were supposed to have a rich history together, with the relevant parts of that history explained as necessary and without a lot of dull, heavy exposition. The three-star rating would have been a four but for the fact that books this deep into the science fiction genre are not really my thing, and because of that my attention did occasionally wander away. Still, I may be reading more of the Vorkosigan series anyway, now that I'm interested in the characters.