seaweed's reviews
28 reviews

once more ann leckie puts us in the head of a great being that has been alive for too long and is harboring its own agenda. also some gender
works every time

The book is poorly structured, especially in the first few chapters with constant "we will talk about that in part x" that serves nothing but to obscure the topic at hand and pad word count. It also commits the sin of repeating phrases verbatim from earlier parts of the book, hoping you wouldn't notice, and at times would appeal to nebulous authority such as "sociologists say" with no references, which usually means 'I read a magazine article interviewing one sociologist once'.

The whole vibe is series of blog posts shoved into a book without a lot of thought put into it. After learning that the author is a host of a podcast about cults, it makes a lot of sense. 

A very easy read that got me out of a reading slump, but not a lot of substance. 

The most mid book in existence. The quintessential 5/10. Character writing is competent, and the parts of the world we learned about are fascinating enough, but I could find absolutely nothing to actually grab me in the entire 17 hours.

The author was too obsessed with her irrelevant life stories. Absolutely insufferable breed of nonfiction. Used the word stan two or three times in the introduction.

neither cities not stairs have been thoroughly explored. less is said about their divines, the better

You Feel It Just Below The Ribs took me 3 weeks to finish, despite low page count and easy sentence structure, because it was boring, unnecessary and not particularly well-written (very quotable though! hooray for that). 

If you have not familiar with the podcast Within The Wires, there is a chance you could enjoy it, since everything will be new information to you. 

If you are a fan of the podcast, don't waste your time. I can guarantee that whatever you imagined about its world will be ten times more interesting than what the team chose to commit to. It feels as if the authors had a couple of ideas (already implemented inside the podcast) and thought to themselves: hm, can we squeeze a book out of this without bringing anything new or original to the table? - and then proceeded to do exactly that. There is one function it could serve - as a timeline, and a subpar one at that, since this fictional memoir barely uses dates. 

As a gothic mystery, the book does not succeed. Neither does it succeed as a character study. But most of all, it fails as a haunted house story. The author constantly describes the house as breathing, or having impossible angles, but never mentions how it is supposed to look like, leaving the overall impression of empty plastic.

Truly less than a sum of its parts.

The book features two big plot threads - the continuation of the Mahit/Three Seagrass relationship and the threat of a devastating war. The dedication mentions Stanislav Petrov - a USSR officer who in American consciousness is known for preventing the nuclear war by refusing the order to fire. In reality, there hadn't been one: the sensors were deceiving them, which they had identified in time. This is extremely relevant to the other two narrators of the book, Nine Hibiscus and Eight Antidote, who are faced with an existential threat - aliens with technology exceeding humans'. They must combat the internal fleet politics and learn who benefits from each outcome.

Quite often I was distracted by the machinery of the story. "Aha, Three Seagrass is chosen to develop a complex linguistic system to communicate with aliens (even though she is more of a poet and politician than linguist), and she has no apprehension about being sent to an actual battlefield where people die in droves". "Aha, the situation at Lsel is so dire as to relieve Mahit of the necessity to decide whether she wants the empire or home". "Aha, this precocious child is curious and overhears many conversations providing important context to other stories" (oh how I loathe this trope. thankfully here it amounted to something in the end). This also made it hard to care for characters outside the 4 narrators, because the story very insistently told me I should, but I just didn't get enough screentime from them.

Also the chapter are structures in a very annoying way - jumping arbitrarily between the 4 narrators with only new lines as indicators.

Version of the story I would have enjoyed more would not involve Mahit and Three Seagrass.

General's friend should have been the communications officer tasked with the first contact - this way we could have gotten to know him better, and had a chance to explore the themes of maintaining cultural traditions in the face of assimilation from a new angle. A giant fleet, as a very heterogenous place, could have provided ample opportunity to introduce even more cultures and angles - so far, we only have 2 (two) on screen!
Mahit could have entered the scene after the shared mind hypothesis was proven.

Please understand correctly - I absolutely love the girls (and the sex scene was great). But all this could have been saved for another book and given more care there. The topic of romantic relationships on the edge of civilization (teixcalaanli and not) was already touched upon in the previous book with Yskander, and this one doesn't develop it that much further - of course, they spent only 3 days together while trying to figure out aliens. There simply isn't enough time for more!

TLDR: the book tried to tackle several very interesting, but disparate topics, and left me dissatisfied with every one. 

Whoever decides to pick up this book should know: this isn't a story about characters, but about populations, trends and - yes - politics, told through several POV characters. To demonstrate: the best chapter of the book is the debate one, which also includes a non-diagetic table! The author simply decided that a table would be the best option to illustrate one character's feelings on a topic.
If this excites you, then you are looking at the right book! It has a lot of horrible little details about the life in the latter half of the 21 century - for example, the gig economy has become a norm to such an extent, that service providers bid for each order, and getting a haircut turns into a public auction of tired hair dressers.