For me, often the fantasy genre is as much about the setting as it is about the plots and characters. Not that these don't need to have a great deal of believable inpact, it's just that without a compelling setting fantasy tends to fall flat on it's face.

So when I first started reading Lois McMasters Bujold I was keen to note how much skill she creates her worlds with. There isn't anything ground breaking here. Gods are very real, very powerful and very involved in the world. Rather than being wholly manifest on the world's surface however, the Gods of Chalion choose saints to work through. For these individuals the blessing is a double edged sword, it can make life very very complicated.

This book is the second of those set in the Chalion universe, and I hesitate to call it a sequel, for all that it contains some of the same characters as the first and technically takes chronologically after it. The story this time focuses on a minor character of 'Curse of Chalion' as she begins a pilgrimage to thank and the honour the Gods and escape the emotional battering of the events of the previous novel. It has much of the same wry humour as the first novel and goes some way to deepen a reader's understanding of the way the powers that be operate in Chalion. Ista, as a kind of anti-heroine is thrown into a plot so very thick with universe specific magic that it becomes very hard to guess the ending. It does, however, manage this without alienating the reader through jargon and badly managed plot as I have seen in a few novels that have tried a similar technique. The key to Bujold's success here is simplicity. There's little in the way of 'magic', only really bad luck and ill-advised desperate measures.
Bujold is a master at not over flowering her language. Her characters are practical, hard put-upon and her narrative reflects this, I have never once felt that there was a sentence, description or metaphor out of place. She leans quite heavily on internal monologue to convey her character's story but I think within the context of their trials that this makes sense and it has never jarred for me. it becomes especially useful during parts of her novels that are heavy on the political intrigue.

I would heartily recommend the series, and only lament that there aren't more of them. Having never read her larger science fiction series - The Vorkosigan Saga, I can only hope she's managed to paint as rich and vivid world as she has done here. I would, if you have not already done so, read the first one too, The Curse of Chalion, as while they do stand alone, I think this novel stands much better with the context of what went before.