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My general impression of this work is that it's mainly impressive as someone's first published book. It has a lot of parts of it which are extremely rough around the edges and detract from the reading experience, but what's here is good enough that I hope to read later works by this author once they have developed a bit more.

What's bad about this book is that the narrative is fairly confusing, the art on some pages adds to that, it seems really to be trying too hard to subvert expectations, and it's a little too short so the ending doesn't feel entirely earned.

What's good about this book is that the art makes a big impact on "set piece" pages, there is a complex world set up here which appears to have many allegorical implications for our own world, and choosing to have the main character be the griot rather than the prince is more interesting than the typical fare involving princes.

I last read this book something like twenty years ago. I thought it was a good book, not a great book, but it did stick with me. My book club selected this as our read for August... I was a little disappointed because I wanted to read something new for me. Well, turns out I got quite a lot more out of reading this the second time... and I'm now convinced that it's Le Guin's best book.

This book kind of gets flattened to being about gender in popular discourse and it is about gender... but it's also about politics and trust and survival. It's also about how gender impacts all of those things... Gender as a material condition.

I also feel that it's the case that all of the parts of this book come together very well. The asides into folk tales strengthen the illusion of the world Le Guin has built.

The TLDR: I read this book for my book club, and it's not a book I normally would have read and it is a book I would find difficult to recommend, but I am glad to have read it.

The hook of this book is essentially a kind of year 2000 edge-lord humor. I'm not interested in that aspect, which regrettably suffuses the entire book. As such, the narrator is of course some kind of deranged pedophile.

However, underneath the pitch of the book is an interesting commentary on our modern society--what is it to so heavily identify with a brand? What does it mean to exist in this space where all public spaces are now privately owned, but all of our private thoughts are now transmitted publicly (regardless of if others want them)? What does it mean for us if everything is sufficient, and nothing aspires to be more or less than that?

To borrow a phrase from Wenderoth... the book itself is an insufficient meal, and nothing tastes as sweet.