Well, this series is clearly one of those that believes in providing answers in book two that do not, in the end, make anything make more sense.
Still a surprisingly enjoyable and atmospheric book; it builds on the previous one and is not quite as successful, but at least seems to be going somewhere. The weirdness was a better weird...for lack of any other description. And while this is pretty far outside my usual comfort zone, I'm glad I decided to pick it up.
I feel like a need a break before the third book, except I have less than a week until it's due back to the library, so possibly not.

Still weird. Still good.
Better than the second book, which suffered simply for not being set in Area X and in a series so dependent on place and ecology, the absence of the main character was uncomfortable.
The bit of my brain that likes people comforts such as closure was a bit miffed at the end, but the narrative didn't really suggest I would get it and I didn't really expect it. It's not that kind of story. And what it did, it did really well...whatever that was.

So this really made me want to reread Best of All Possible Worlds and absolutely reaffirms my sense that Karen Lord is following in Bujold's footsteps while also forging ahead.
It's a bit confusing if you, like me, retain NO information about any book you read more than a week ago, but one catches up quickly and Lord never really leaves you hanging. It's still a brilliant universe and Lord has lost none of her skill at shifting between the interplanetary macro view and interpersonal micro. In fact, she's gotten even better at not springing ideas on her readers.
I wanted to spend a bit more time with my favorite characters from the previous book, but then I always do.
This was a good one.

There was something decidedly clever about this book - a combination of the main character's voice, which just really worked for me and the way that the plot actually played out. It upended so many familiar fantasy tropes and I loved that it grappled with questions of invasion and conquering lands and taking over and...

It was just good. Good secondary world, character focused fantasy, which is exactly what I like.

Yeah, well, after I enjoyed the first book so much, I wasn't very well going to stop?

Especially not with the romantic subplot unresolved. Seriously, who do you think I am?

Really intriguing premise, fascinating philosophical sci-fi and a really enjoyably narrative. And while the characters, overall, seemed secondary to the plot, they never felt wooden or prop-like.

It's so hard to rate these, especially because I know I read them ages and ages ago...some time long before I started doing silly things like keeping track.

Le Guin is amazing and I sometimes forget how she, like Tolkien in a way, innovated all these ideas that are the cornerstone of contemporary fantasy and managed to do them better than most everyone else.

And the Valdemar reread continues apace. Still fun, still a nice distaction, still the reason I'm getting through so few new books this year.
And so it goes.

As a weird and intricate work of epic fantasy, this was excellent. I seem to have gone off world-sized epic fantasy recently, which explains the ratings. Hurley's sense of the surreal is kind of amazing - this book is more straightforward than [b:God's War|119227|The War God's Own (War God, #2)|David Weber|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1321607664s/119227.jpg|1229397] and yet so much of it has the same resonance to it.
If you like epic fantasy, you will enjoy this.
If you don't like epic fantasy anymore, you might want to consider taking a break for a year or two rather than trying to read everything that looks good anyway...

Walton's books remain really interesting works of...inquiry, I suppose. She's very good at taking a premise (what if we actually established Plato's Republic, e.g.) and building it into a story. And I enjoy figuring out where she goes with it and how it becomes an actual story, with plot and everything.
The good is very good. Her biggest shortcoming, and it is a problem I seem to have with most of her books, is how difficult I find it to get emotionally invested in the characters. This book, perhaps because of the sheer number of viewpoints, was worse than usual. I felt like the individual characters lacked defining voices and, while I was curious about the fate of the city and the people in it, I found it hard to be invested in them as individuals.
Still, the premise and story make up for a lot and I'm looking forward to the sequel.