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A review by laci
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
5.0
Excellent. The beginning might have been a bit confusing, but that surely was in part done deliberately, to let you figure out who or what the protagonist is.
One thing I found a bit confusing was the whole deal with names and genders. At times, it felt like there is the protagonist, and everyone else is a woman with a name starting with 'S', which isn't great, since I have trouble remembering character names even when they are much more varied. Plus, there was a 'language that used gendered nouns and pronouns', and people had to guess gender, sometimes they got it wrong, then nobody corrected them and even joined them to keep them in the dark for some reason... it ended up with me not even knowing how many people there are in the room, and whether that 'he' and 'she' are actually the same person or not. This is not a big gripe, mind you: I found it unusual and interesting, way more than I found it annoying.
Also, without revealing too much: at the start, the protagonist thought about how she missed having various input data streams, and kept describing minutiae of her facial expressions, and the actions of others ("She answered after five seconds.") I wondered whether there's a reason for that - and when it turned out there was, it was awesome and made the narration so much more captivating. The author handled everything absolutely brilliantly.
One thing I found a bit confusing was the whole deal with names and genders. At times, it felt like there is the protagonist, and everyone else is a woman with a name starting with 'S', which isn't great, since I have trouble remembering character names even when they are much more varied. Plus, there was a 'language that used gendered nouns and pronouns', and people had to guess gender, sometimes they got it wrong, then nobody corrected them and even joined them to keep them in the dark for some reason... it ended up with me not even knowing how many people there are in the room, and whether that 'he' and 'she' are actually the same person or not. This is not a big gripe, mind you: I found it unusual and interesting, way more than I found it annoying.
Also, without revealing too much: at the start, the protagonist thought about how she missed having various input data streams, and kept describing minutiae of her facial expressions, and the actions of others ("She answered after five seconds.") I wondered whether there's a reason for that - and when it turned out there was, it was awesome and made the narration so much more captivating. The author handled everything absolutely brilliantly.