The Warrior's Apprentice

, #3

Kindle Edition, 320 pages

English language

Published July 19, 2011 by Spectrum Literary Agency, Inc..

View on OpenLibrary

4 stars (4 reviews)

Between the seemingly impossible tasks of living up to his warrior-father's legend and surmounting his own physical limitations, Miles Vorkosigan faces some truly daunting challenges. Shortly after his arrival on Beta Colony, Miles unexpectedly finds himself the owner of an obsolete freighter and in more debt than he ever thought possible. Propelled by his manic "forward momentum," the ever-inventive Miles creates a new identity for himself as the commander of his own mercenary fleet to obtain a lucrative cargo; a shipment of weapons destined for a dangerous warzone.

11 editions

How To Lead A Military Without Trying

3 stars

Miles Vorkosigan washes out military school and heads to another planetary system to spend time with his grandmother and her family. There he decides to bail out some down & outers using his name and a bit of family money and do some smuggling/inter system trade to recover the money. Things go poorly and the only way through each obstacle is bluffing, and at every step he succeeds but has to face every larger obstacles afterward.

As a sci-fi adventure plot, it's adequate. But Miles "I'm a nice guy using my position to try to get in the pants of the woman who reports to me" vibe really brought me down. At least the character who raped women in the previous book wasn't given a "I was just following orders and feel bad about" pass from the narrative. Which it seemed like it would. There's still some amount of "we …

The Warrior's Apprentice

3 stars

With Cordelia and Aral's story mostly backgrounded, we now get to the Miles Vorkosigan stretch of novels. Miles washes out of military school due to his physical disabilities and easily broken bones; he ends up on a trip to Beta Colony as a vacation with his bodyguard Bothari, and Bothari's daughter and Miles' childhood friend Elena.

This was the first book in this series I ever read, and I almost bounced off of it the first time through. My partner also stopped reading two thirds of the way through and then came back and finished much much later. This book has big "it gets better in season 3 I promise" energy.

For me, it's a weaker book than the two Cordelia books prior in a number of ways, and honestly there's really only so much I can take of teenager Miles. It's partially his self-loathing--internalizing the way that Barrayar treats …