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joshsharp 's review for:
Translation State
by Ann Leckie
medium-paced
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Look, I really liked the Ancillary trilogy. What I want from further Imperial Radch books is more of the same. But you can't go back, and I'm not the same reader who read those books, so what I'm saying is maybe it's me. But this one just didn't give me what I was after at all.
In this story we get three alternating perspectives who fortunately don't take too long to coalesce: Enae, a 50-something human person (sie/hir pronouns), Reet, a 31-year-old human man in a different culture, and Qven, a juvenile Presger Translator.
Only one of these characters is explicitly written as a child and yet all of them feel naïve, undeveloped, lacking maturity and confidence and just a general sense of experience being in the world. For Qven to read this way makes sense. For all three to give this impression is profoundly annoying.
The stakes in this story are ostensibly the fate of the whole treaty that keeps Presger from destroying humanity. But the actual stakes are things like: do I even have friends? Where do I fit in? Is my desire for this other person reciprocated? These are totally valid questions, but they are not engaged with in a particularly deep way. It's superficial, low-stakes... Cosy. Taken as a whole this book feels much "cosier" than past Imperial Radch books, in a way that I wasn't expecting and didn't enjoy. And eventually I put my finger on it: this reads like YA. There's nothing wrong with YA, but it's not what I want to read and not what I thought I was getting.
And as an aside, Reet being obsessed with watching his adventure series feels very Murderbot. I know Ann Leckie is a fan so I assume this is deliberate. It didn't do anything for me.
All of this is to say that I feel let down, and if it's me, well that's on me. But it really feels like I'm not the one who changed. What happened to you, man? You used to be cool.
In this story we get three alternating perspectives who fortunately don't take too long to coalesce: Enae, a 50-something human person (sie/hir pronouns), Reet, a 31-year-old human man in a different culture, and Qven, a juvenile Presger Translator.
Only one of these characters is explicitly written as a child and yet all of them feel naïve, undeveloped, lacking maturity and confidence and just a general sense of experience being in the world. For Qven to read this way makes sense. For all three to give this impression is profoundly annoying.
The stakes in this story are ostensibly the fate of the whole treaty that keeps Presger from destroying humanity. But the actual stakes are things like: do I even have friends? Where do I fit in? Is my desire for this other person reciprocated? These are totally valid questions, but they are not engaged with in a particularly deep way. It's superficial, low-stakes... Cosy. Taken as a whole this book feels much "cosier" than past Imperial Radch books, in a way that I wasn't expecting and didn't enjoy. And eventually I put my finger on it: this reads like YA. There's nothing wrong with YA, but it's not what I want to read and not what I thought I was getting.
And as an aside, Reet being obsessed with watching his adventure series feels very Murderbot. I know Ann Leckie is a fan so I assume this is deliberate. It didn't do anything for me.
All of this is to say that I feel let down, and if it's me, well that's on me. But it really feels like I'm not the one who changed. What happened to you, man? You used to be cool.