This book takes everything I liked about the first book and throws it out the window. I'm not sure why the writer found it necessary to, after writing a book with a tight plot and close inspection of nuanced characters, turn around and write a sequel with neither.
The overwhelming majority of characters in this book either lack depth, or have no motivation beyond 'wanton cruelty and petty malice borne of ignorance'. While that's a believable motivation, surely, it does get grating when it's literally everyone who doesn't align themselves with the protagonist.
Breq, in the first book, is flawed, interesting, and relatable. In the second book, she's always right about everything, with little subtlety or nuance. She understands human motivations perfectly, can predict everyone's movements constantly, and wins over everyone who is initially skeptical. Those who don't see the light never will, they're lesser and anyway she's always right.
Furthermore, she became totally uninteresting to me as a protagonist, but I'm at least aware this is my personal biases speaking. When you put your character in a position of power, in the military, representing a government with imperialist interests, on a planet that has suffered the horrible ravages of colonialism, it's hard enough to make them sympathetic already. Breq is in this position, but she's supposed to care about everyone and be capable of empathy. Yet, for all her shining brilliance, she's like everyone else: she'll help in small ways, if a problem falls literally in her lap, or if it inconveniences her. But widespread change? Actually fixing systematic problems? Well, that's someone else's headache, surely.
Yes, you can say that's a tall order for anyone, but upholding justice is like pacifism: doing anything less than all you can is tantamount to doing nothing at all. Practicing pacifism sometimes is just selective violence, and justice for some is just another word for injustice. It's not a path for everyone, and not everyone should try, but the book presents Breq's actions as just and necessary, and never acknowledges that she does more than a little, but far less than enough. It's a problem symptomatic of many books tackling themes of social change and systematic injustice: enacting any positive wide scale change is simply not a matter for discussion, it's a foregone conclusion.
I'm not asking for Breq to change the world. I'm asking the book to acknowledge that the tiny little things she's willing to do are not, actually, the shining beacon of hope the book presents them as. She is still a colonizer, and all she's doing is allowing the occasional disenfranchised native who falls into her lap to benefit from her imperialist power and influence.
There's also the matter of the plot, which is stagnant and meandering, to contrast with the straight-forward and unremitting pace of the first book. It sets up plot points for later that require one to empathize with the imperialist forces (who are, again, written as explicitly imperialist) or wonder at the clearly contrived mystery, set obviously up as a hook for the sequel. The first book was fluid, and the progression felt natural. In this one, everything seems constructed for the needs of the moment.
A disappointing read. Perhaps the first book works better as a standalone.
