Barrayar

Another entertaining Bujold novel (I expect no less). Barrayar won the Hugo Award. This books shows us the culture in Barrayar, the Vorkosigan home planet, and explains how Miles, the protagonist of most of the VORKOSIGAN books, became deformed.

http://www.fantasyliterature.com/fantasy-author/bujoldloismcmaster/

Like the first book in this series, this is a really good science fiction culture clash book that is somewhat marred by some dated and naive treatments of SA.

On the whole, Cordelia is one of my favorites of old school SF heroines. She is a scientist, an adventurer, a sometimes soldier, and in this book she is also a wife and mother, and she holds all these identities without sacrificing a one of them. Her impressions of Barrayar still ring as a commentary on our barbaric world today even thirty years later. God reading older science fiction can really show you how little has changed. Bujold is a great writer who balances political intrigue and action fairly effortlessly.

But again, it's hard to gloss over the way SA and mental health in general are treated. It feels like dated misunderstanding more than anything, but it definitely requires a big old content warning at the top not for any sort of graphicness but just for how casually it is treated. I don't think Bujold would write this way anymore, but it does dampen an otherwise wonderful adventure read.