Despite a few hiccupy-repetitions that should have been edited out, Grover Gardener gives his usual engaging reading of a Miles novel. The book demonstrates how we form our identities by seeing ourselves mirrored in the people around us. Throughout the novel, Bujold explores identity-through clones (e.g., how a clone feels towards his or her famous progenitor), gender (e.g., how a hermaphrodite receives and resists male or female classifications), torture (e.g., how a person's personality is exposed and fragmented by torture), death (e.g., how people who die and revive may forget who they were), families (e.g., how siblings shape each other's personalities), and roles (e.g., how an emperor plays a simulacrum of an emperor).

After this disorienting opening, Bujold alternates point of view chapters between the two young men as the clone discovers that leading a Miles-esque mission is not so easy and Miles discovers that cleaning up after his clone ('brother!') is not so easy either. Thus whenever one of Miles' mercenaries lights up when mistaking him for Miles, Mark's resentment towards his progenitor grows. Mark desperately wants his gambit to succeed, because he sympathizes with the clones and wants to strike a blow against the clone body harvesting industry and because he needs to prove himself to be as capable as his charismatic and successful older 'brother' Miles in order to form his own identity. Though the clones believe that their parents will come to get them, in fact their brains will be discarded as medical waste to free up their young bodies to house the brains of aged and wealthy clients.

Wait! It's not Miles but his psychologically damaged and brilliant clone ('brother!') Mark attempting to pass himself off as Miles so as to lead a squad of mercenaries on a quixotic and dangerous mission to rescue fifty cloned kids from their crèche on Jackson's Whole, a planet of crime syndicate houses. But, down to his last chance, he is too malevolent and hates his body too much and has some major identity issues. That's because the previous four novels (in internal chronology) in her entertaining, character-driven space opera series featuring Miles Vorkosigan have all been narrated from his point of view, so that when Mirror Dance begins with the perceptions of a 4' 9' tall guy who's self-conscious about his 'dwarfish' stature and large head, we assume that it's Miles. To read the first chapter of Lois McMaster Bujold's Mirror Dance (1994) is to receive a stimulating shock. Suspenseful and Satisfying Space Opera of Identity

Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold