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3 stars
I feel like "political thriller" is a buzzterm that gets thrown around rather loosely (having a single character who just happens to be a politician does not a political book make). But here it feels earned; we got ambassadors with secret agendas, high society galas, partisan riots in the streets, technological sabotage, constantly shifting secret alliances and backroom deals made in the dead of night. Oh yeah, and two distinct imminent wars looming over everyone's heads.
It's hard for me to say whether all of that was a helpful vehicle or a distraction for what this book really wanted to be about, which was identity (what is the ~self~ and how much can that change before you become someone else?) and about being enamored and subsumed by a different culture that you will never be 100% assimilated into, whether you want to or not. That isn't to say that this …
I feel like "political thriller" is a buzzterm that gets thrown around rather loosely (having a single character who just happens to be a politician does not a political book make). But here it feels earned; we got ambassadors with secret agendas, high society galas, partisan riots in the streets, technological sabotage, constantly shifting secret alliances and backroom deals made in the dead of night. Oh yeah, and two distinct imminent wars looming over everyone's heads.
It's hard for me to say whether all of that was a helpful vehicle or a distraction for what this book really wanted to be about, which was identity (what is the ~self~ and how much can that change before you become someone else?) and about being enamored and subsumed by a different culture that you will never be 100% assimilated into, whether you want to or not. That isn't to say that this felt like three different books rolled into one, but if you wanted to make that argument, you'd have material to work with.
Language nerd that I am, I enjoyed how the protagonist would play around with the fictional language of the empire she was in, usually intentionally-accidentally switching to informal speech when playing dumb was in her best interests; "weaponized barbarism" for lack of a better term. And the reader very much gets the impression that she's an outsider in this setting, what with her occasional faux-pas and cultural references that go over her (and the reader's) head that other characters in the scene are so familiar with that they don't require explanation.
There were stretches of this book that just felt like a constant stream of back-to-back appointments and it took a little longer than I'd like for the proper action to begin. Still, it's a well-told story with believable enough worldbuilding that I'd like to revisit, but I was also ready to say goodbye to these characters towards the end. Maybe that's just a result of my innate preference for shorter books though, so you might get more out of it if you have a higher "stamina" than I do.
