Breq
is a soldier who used to be a warship. Once a weapon of conquest controlling thousands of minds, now she
only has a single body and serves the emperor she swore to destroy.
Given a new ship and a troublesome crew, Breq is ordered to the only place in the galaxy she will agree to go: Athoek station, to protect the family of a lieutenant she once knew – a lieutenant she murdered in cold blood.
So I read the first book, Ancillary Justice, nine years ago, which was four years after it came out. This book came out a year after the first, but I'm just getting to it now. Why? Well, Goodreads friends of mine had mixed feelings about it and warned it was even more soaked in tea than the first book. But also, by then I'd discovered Murderbot and that's been a far more enjoyable series. In fact, I was wondering if I should re-read Ancillary Justice to see if my opinion of it (five stars) held up.
Not wishing it to collect any more dust on my nightstand, I read it. I'm glad I did, but I didn't love it. Yes, everyone is having tea, and they're having it all the time. It's right there on the very first page.
So the Radch, the name of the empire, comes across as Victorian era Great Britain: The non-stop tea drinking, priceless tea sets, tea plantations, indentured servitude, self-righteous attitudes towards the "uncivilized heathens", fussiness about manners, and aristocratic nobility getting anything they want because of who they are. I didn't get that in the first book, but here it's in our face. With Breq being granted a ship and the rank of Fleet Admiral, we're thrust onto the high seas with Athoek Station as port-of-call. I'm picturing Victorian navy uniforms, all epaulets and big hats.
I found myself more annoyed by usage of the feminine pronouns than in the first book (The Radch doesn't acknowledge gender, so the default is "she") for two reasons. The first is that the indentured people on the planet do acknowledge gender so Breq is forced to be respectful and use their proper pronouns and titles like "grandfather." She struggles to get it right (Wait a second, did I?). The second is that in the Radch navy, everyone uses "sir" to address officers. So everyone is addressed by the feminine all the time in the Radch, except in the navy when they're also addressed by the masculine. The switching back and forth from she to sir and back again was silly. And with more characters to deal with, I had to look for behavioral clues to figure it out. Why was that important? Well, as a reader, I'm always trying to concoct a picture of the character in my head, and Leckie's not making that easy for me. I think I got it right. Maybe.
Anyway, back to the story. The galactic intrigue is put on the backburner. There's a murder that could've been something, but it wound up being nothing other than an excuse for Breq to go down to the planet to observe a mourning ritual. Once there, the whole story turned into the whole Victorian British Empire tea plantation indentured-servitude-is-bad thing, which is fine, but not what I tuned into this series to read about.
Again, it was a fine read, but not what I was hoping for. And with the meh reviews of the third book in the series from my Goodreads friends, I don't know if I want to bother continuing with this series. I mean, there are only so many tea parties I can read about, particularly since my daughter is too old to have them with her stuffed animals.
3 stars
\_/
DED
