Ninefox Gambit

Maybe closer to 3.5 stars rounded down. This book was... whew. It was more difficult to read than Dune and that's saying a lot. I don't mind if books plunged you into the deep end from the beginning, because I do enjoy deciphering a strange new world by inference instead of being told exactly what's what. But this one really tested that to the extreme. From beginning to end I felt like I was, at best, only understanding maybe 70% of the action happening on the page. At worst, it was probably just a mere 20%.

It might be because I'm not one for military fiction, and this is space military fiction, so a lot of it went over my head. For another, Lee uses a lot of terms that mean nothing to me and also doesn't quite explain it. A lot of the unique features of his world remains shrouded in question marks. Because of this indecipherability, I almost DNFed this book. I pushed through and finished it really for only one reason: Shuos Jedao.

There aren't a whole lot of characters in this book that we spend a lot of time with besides Jedao and our other protagonist, Cheris. Jedao was by far the more interesting one. He reminded me of a space general version of Captain Jack Sparrow, where you're constantly guessing which side he's on at this moment. Even though he doesn't even have a physical body, his intelligence, charisma, and gifts of persuasion are all that he needs to get things done his way. Cheris is fine, and as far of a reader self-insert as we could possibly have. What really kept me going though, was wondering what Jedao was really up to in the grand scheme of things, and what was going to happen to him.

There's a glimmer of a really interesting storyline and world in here which was a smaller reason why I continued. There were whole chapters where I skimmed because I had no idea what was going on, but other chapters where I read thoroughly because I did get what was happening and it was engaging. That sums up my experience with this book - when I could understand it, it was amazing, but those moments are probably less than half the time I spent with the book overall.