Ancillary Justice

I enjoyed the slow crescendo of drama. The characters are well-inhabited and I always love the gradual revelation of a world's secrets. I only rarely got confused about the names. I would normally fault a book like this for how many coincidences the plot rests on, but I didn't find them overly implausible in Ancillary Justice's case. There was some reason for each one, and none of the coincidences felt like they strained the plot, just distilled it. I won't call the language sublime, but it read well. Open Ancillary Justice for a space opera that interrogates the assumption of empire, for a character's silent pain dredged in flashbacks, loyalty, and that character's patient search for a sense of self. The central sci-fi conceit deals with what it means to be only a part of yourself, and the impossibility of repressing your feelings forever.

Really enjoyed this book. In some ways it's a classic space opera but there's enough twists on the formula that it feels super fresh. Fascinating explorations of identity, language, and class. The writing was fun and engaging, I ate this book up.

This is a fun space opera that has all the fun space opera things: giant interstellar empires; worldbuilding on various interstellar cultures, and how they interact with each other, and how they do gender; exploration of how cognition and identity works in entities that are not (or not entirely) human; grand plots and conspiracies.

The overall plot is perhaps a bit simple, and some of the characters lean perhaps too much into one-dimensional archetypes, but it does not matter that much against the lively worldbuilding, and how it ties into the whole story.