Jo Walton is as inventive and powerful as ever. This book is a delight. ( )

Oh, a pastoral fantasy, how lovely. I almost wish there was no adventure or no crisis there at all.

I could easily have spent 200 pages just baking bread together with Taveth, helping with the harvest, fishing, picking blackberries... and watching everyone being "raensome" :-))) (But this kind of book might be difficult to explain to a publisher, I suppose.)

It was a slow and beautiful read, made still slower by a very annoying cold, and it's basically a perfect book for when you don't want to stray too far from your sofa... ( )

Part of this is a what would it be like if - part is a fantasy of gradient magic more this direction less that - and part is what a pain interfering gods can be. What if technology got only as far as mill wheels and swords, and what if sexual orientation and chastity weren't issues; time goes slowest in the east where yeya, magic forms everything into the shape of gods and fastest in the west where yeya takes too much effort to be worth practicing; goddess very much wants to get back a woman who has left her and returned to the midlands and an estate that now belongs to her great grandson. As expected, a god can cause a great deal of trouble and pain. 🌈 ( )

More an excercise in world-building than a proper story. It was readable but I got tired of the bucolic idylls. ( )

https://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2020/03/2020034-lifelode-jo-walton.html ( )