Any leftist who finished this book has my admiration and condolences.

I tapped out around 20% when Samuel's started quoting the World Bank on poverty inequality as though they don't literally cause this by looting, pillaging, and heavy-handedly forcing market systems that don't work on whole ass countries and followed up by quoting citizens of those countries on how isolated they feel in their colonization (finessed to not indict neoliberal capitalism, of course).

This is apologia for neoliberal ideology designed to make you look the other way while actual research is damning it.

I am a sucker for linked intergenerational vignettes and enjoyed this one quite a lot.

2.5⭐️ rounded up

Pervasively xenophobic and distractingly so in that way that a lot of American military thrillers are. Some sections are let down with terrible stilted info-dump style dialogue. However, the sections between Maria and Baako have a really solid emotional core, and the overall pacing and events are a credit to the genre.

Better writing and protagonists than most in its genre, but that xenophobic shit is *so uncomfortable*