I enjoyed this a lot but I am not exactly satisfied with it -- it is such classic fantasy-of-agency science fiction, there is a problem for our characters to solve, and

indeed, they solve it!

But I was far, far more interested in the unsolvable problems of relationship between empire and not-empire, between people who think you have to be part of their civilisation to actually *be* civilised, and the rest of the world.   That's all there, but I wanted the weight of the book to be on THAT and not on the plotty sfnal problem-solving.   It's one of those books where I feel like the author was caught in the demands of her genre, and I probably wouldn't think anything of it except that the first book felt so much less by-the-numbers in terms of what was going on.