384 pages
2013
Publisher: Orb
Source: B&N.com
Description: On a remote, icy planet, the soldier known as Breq is drawing closer to completing her quest.
Breq is both more than she seems and less than she was. Years ago, she was the Justice of Toren--a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of corpse soldiers in the service of the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy.
An act of treachery has ripped it all away, leaving her with only one fragile human body. And only one purpose--to revenge herself on Anaander Mianaai, many-bodied, near-immortal Lord of the Radch. (From the back cover)
Review: This is one of those books its not hard to understand why its been nominated for a lot of awards.
It does a good job of pacing the revelation of the events that led Breq to this mission and the details of her plan, which for a long time will seem completely pointless to the reader, without the it feeling like the author was holding information back.
My one complaint with the book was the way the author handled Berq's issues with distinguishing gender. I had no issue with Berq having this problem, after all she was a ship, built by a race that doesn't bother with gendered pronouns, and dealt with a wide variety of people, all with different "standards" for what indicates male vs. female amongst them, plus various non-humans she had met over the years. That part made perfect sense. What didn't make sense to me as a reader, was the fact she kept dwelling on it. It seemed more like the author thought the readers might forget, so felt the need to repeat this idea more than felt natural for the story. It does come up a lot less by the end of the book.
Overall, I'm looking forward to book two in this series.
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