Bookish Thoughts

This book was the perfect conclusion to a trilogy that started off as a tale of vengeance and became so much more. There are people figuring out who they are. There are people figuring out what it means to be a person. There's an empire that has grown to large and is starting to crumble. There are people figuring out how to take advantage of that for their own gains. There are small stories writ large and a focus on doing what you can even if it seems small because there are ripple effects you can't sleep.  But the reason that this book is going to stick with me is that it had a perfect ending. I can even share it with you without spoiling the trilogy, which is part of it's perfection. Entertainments nearly always end with triumph or disaster - happiness achieved, or total, tragic defeat precluding any hope of it. But there is always more after the ending - always the next morning and the next, always changes, losses and gains. Always one step after the other. Until the one...

In the second Imperial Radch book, the scope both narrows and widens. Our narrator is sent to a small station orbiting a backwater planet, where she finds a wealth of problems to contend with. Despite the fact that the story takes place at the edge of the empire, it provides a microcosm of what everyone is going through. The empire has grown too large and leadership is starting to fracture. It's the fall of Rome, on a planetary scale, and it's fascinating to read. This was a good mid-trilogy bridge. The story pivots from the quest for vengeance to something more sustainable, and adds some new wrinkles to everything. It was a lot more fun to read, now that I'm more accustomed to the author's style, but she has a lot of interesting things to say and a lot of interesting ways to say them. She might well become a must-read author for me.

This book was utterly fantastic. It required a lot of me as a reader. Between the shifting timelines, the multi-threading of the narrator's perspective, and the gender gymnastics, I really had to pay close attention. But the story itself, one of vengeance and justice, was totally worth it.  I think reading Poldark helped me a lot in parsing this book. Graham writes party scenes that require the reader to follow and untangle two or three simultaneous conversations. It was hard in the first book, but now I've gotten used to it and am much better at tracking who's talking to whom. In this book, the main character is an artificial intelligence construct filtering inputs from multiple sensors at once. She's a ship and each individual component of that ship. The author demonstrates this by throwing everything at the reader at once. It takes some work to keep everything straight, but it makes for a really engrossing and unique reading experience. Not to mention that it was a g...