Ancillary Sword

This was a fun enough ride, but I also constantly felt like I was just skating on the surface of some deeper meaning that I'm too dense to decipher, and therefore also just skating on the brink of some deeper appreciation and enjoyment of it.

The Imperial Radch series by Ann Leckie is spectacular. The core ideas and premise in it may not be a breath of fresh air by this point, but the way Leckie constructs those tropes from ground-up and pushes them to its limit will certainly make the books in the series stand out in one's mind, no matter how many iterations of the same tropes one has read before.

But there's also a denseness to Leckie's writing that is not the easiest to parse. It requires the utmost attention as you read it, maybe even demands re-reads to fully understand the intricacies of the world Leckie is building and the nuances of the character interactions here. That is probably why I felt like I was skating on the surface all the time, even more so than I did with the first book.

While the first book, Ancillary Justice, was also dense, it had a lot more action going on so there were moments of re-grouping where we had time to catch up with the information given to us. In this one though, there isn't really that much movement happening. Our ship protagonist, Breq, has now been made Fleet Captain by the Lord of the Radch herself. In such a position, she makes her way towards Athoek station ostensibly to protect that system as a delegate of the Radch. She doesn't tell people that it is also the hometown of her late captain, Lt. Awn, where she intends to find Awn's sister to make amends. Along the way, Breq makes friends and enemies amongst the various races living on Athoek, and serves justice as she understands it.

There is a lot more politics about imperialism here, and the friction not only between colonizer (Radchaai) and the colonized races, but also the friction between colonized races, depending on how closely they have formed alliances with the Radchaai and therefore have moved up the socioeconomic hierarchy. It was all reminiscent (and perhaps deliberately so) of British imperialism and therefore of my own Commonwealth country and history, something that I honestly did not expect from this book. I appreciated the thoughts and discussion the book had on whether Breq's so-called justice was futile and in fact detrimental no matter how well-intentioned.

Overall though, this book was okay. It's a hard one for me to rate. I enjoyed it, but at the same time it didn't blow my mind - and yet, I'm not even sure if I just need to read it closer and harder. I feel like I missed a few points here, and I keep thinking it's entirely my fault for not having paid enough attention while reading, given how popular and beloved this book is. Definitely will read the next one though.