If you're reading this on Goodreads, you'll see I gave it four stars, and honestly, I almost gave it five, but decided not to only because of some uncertainty about the sequel. Not that I've read it, yet, because my public library, for reasons best known to certain city officials, lacks the funding to catalogue paperbacks, so every library expedition is a bit like a dungeon crawl. Does the library own the sequel? Who knows! Certainly not the Public Library! (Mr Katz, I hope to make you the number one google result for "library cheapskate." You're welcome.)

Back on topic. A lot of the SF I read is more properly space opera; it may pay some lip service to relativity, but the only physics it obeys are Newtonian. Here is SF with science behind it; undergirding it; moving it. Not the sort where a half chapter is taken up with cats in boxes and lecturing the reader, but the sort where the science is almost palpably a character in itself.

Shan Frankland is an interesting protagonist: a retirement-age civil-servant and former police officer. She's explicitly Pagan, something I would have liked to have seen more of, although there are something like five sequels to this book, and quite a bit more room for it to come up.

The other interesting thing, to me, was how much of the book was about ecology, and human (and alien) environments, environmental sustainability, and biology. More than is evident at the start of the novel, certainly. I want to say more, but am wary of spoiling.

I'm not entirely certain if this book is very good, or just very much the sort of thing I enjoy. It takes mature loners and gives them a connection which they didn't expect to find. I like those sorts of stories.