With the best will in the world I couldn't get into this. It took me literally months to read. I kept at it because I hate not finishing books, but it felt like a chore.

Part of it was the length - this book is enormous, and my patience for enormous SFF gets measurably lower by the day. Part of it was the pacing, which I found unutterably turgid until the last hundred pages or so. But the big thing that put me off was the two competing stories. Although they come together in the end, the bulk of this enormous tome follows two different species and two different plotlines. This can be a great way to write a book, but when readers like one storyline much more than the other, the other risks being thought an absolute drag, and that's what happened here. If this book had been all about the spiders I'd have given it 3 stars. They were interesting characters, an interesting society - and on a fascinating cusp in their development. But the sympathetic spiders were constantly interrupted by the interminably tedious Queng Ho/Emergents plotline. I enjoyed nothing about that half of the book. Didn't care about the characters or culture, was seriously put off by the constant underlying sexual assault and general nastiness. As a result, the bad outweighed the good here, and the book as a whole just couldn't hold my attention.