I loved this author's style and the book was really cool. Derring-do, character growth, lots of threads to follow, all pulled into a cohesive story.

Having recently read the Ring World and Ring World Engineers by Niven, I almost felt this was a reply to his stories. Heavily female and queer with an eye to further inclusivity, the story was a serious counterpoint to his rampant misogyny and serious inability to take "the other" seriously.

The Terran World (federation? I can't recall the third word.) was a nice balance against the ... um, other governmental body (I'm so bad with names!). When telling my daughter about the story, I referred to them as Texas. A loosely confederated system of corporations who fought more or less openly with each other, one representative actually said they were fulfilling their god-given right to a second manifest destiny.