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Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I love this book so much. This is my third time reading it.

I love Breq so hard. She is so badass and strong and brave. I love that Seivarden has no choice in the face of such awesomeness but to pledge complete loyalty and faith.

The world building here is complex and deep and interesting. The characters are so fascinating (a soldier out of time, a tyrant with an almost limitless reach and a personality disorder, a thousands year old AI who's been cut off from the hive mind), and the plot unfolds so beautifully as the narrative alternates timelines.

At the time I'm typing this, I'm a fourth of the way through the second book (also reading it for the third time) and anxious to finish so that I can read the final book which I haven't read yet.

View all my reviews

Crossposts: http://lunabee34.livejournal.com/519136.html

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

executrix

I bounced hard off the time frame--I would have found it a lot easier to believe that the initial events were, say, 100 years ago instead of 1,000 and that Breq scraped Seivarden out of the gutter where she had been for two instead of twenty years. I just couldn't believe that things would remain essentially unchanged for that long!

From:

lunabee34

That didn't bother me. Distances are portrayed as being so far (not in the first book, so if you bounced off the first and didn't read any more of them, that wasn't really highlighted in the first) between planets, stations, and systems, that travel between them takes years in some cases. Nothing is instantaneous.

And, this is also not so much in the first book, things are not the same. The Radch have changed significantly since Seivarden dropped off the map 1000 years ago (her house doesn't even exist anymore!), and all the places they go to have their own different social structure and customs based on what was there before they were colonized.

For me the part that stretches credulity is that Anaander Mianiaai had enough time to make enough of her and get them far enough apart from each other to really get a strangehold on control. Once she's got it, I have no trouble believing she kept it, but she must have had a great deal of help to start with.