Ancillary Justice

On paper this ticked a load of really interesting boxes and has won a load of awards and been well reviewed.

Sentient spaceships, futuristic cultures, and space opera in general - sounds good!

I just didn’t find the story interesting and honestly I was bored from about 25% onwards.

I will try the second book at some point just in case it’s a timing thing or a slow start to the series.

I wasn’t a fan of the writing style and I was irritated by how that translated to the repetition of long names over and over in the audio presentation.

Amazing, with a capital A. It's been a while since a book grabbed me this quickly and this hard.

Really enjoyed this book. In some ways it's a classic space opera but there's enough twists on the formula that it feels super fresh. Fascinating explorations of identity, language, and class. The writing was fun and engaging, I ate this book up.

This is a fun space opera that has all the fun space opera things: giant interstellar empires; worldbuilding on various interstellar cultures, and how they interact with each other, and how they do gender; exploration of how cognition and identity works in entities that are not (or not entirely) human; grand plots and conspiracies.

The overall plot is perhaps a bit simple, and some of the characters lean perhaps too much into one-dimensional archetypes, but it does not matter that much against the lively worldbuilding, and how it ties into the whole story.