3.5/5

I think the book suffered from its own hype. Going into the novel with all the awards and accolades it's received my expectations were pretty high. As always, it's easier to criticize than praise, but the bar was set pretty high for this first trilogy piece.

Firstly, the book is very slow until the final act. It was not a quick hook. On a similar note, the final act is very hurried. The last chapter has a flurry of action that would have been better spaced out.

Partly because of the condensed ending and the difficulty of determining characters, the ending is confusing. I already tagged the review as spoilered, so I'll go ahead and say: the plot twist with anaander mianaai is very cool and interesting as a plot development point, but almost incomprehensible from the narrative. It's never quiet clear which anaander is speaking or which breq is supporting. I believe this confusion is intentional, but I don't think it's helpful.

Much has been made about the gender play in the book, using only female pronouns. I actually thought this was pretty interesting, but could have been better executed. It seemed a little on the nose, and many of Breq's encounters on the first planet seemingly existed to remark on her gender differences. The end result was that I felt Leckie hammering this point where simply committing to Breq's perspective and enforcing the pronouns throughout would have been stronger.

Difficulties in pacing and experimentation aside, I really enjoyed the retro feel of the novel. It definitely has echoes of old style space opera, and the ancillary system was very cool to think about (and pretty well implemented in the multiple characters speaking). If anything, I think it might have erred a bit too much on explanation, hardly a rare sin in the genre, but it often felt that Breq was explaining herself to me rather than always existing in her world.

Good, but not as amazing as I'd hoped.