Callender is an amazing writer, once you get used to their flow and style. People saying the protagonist is unlikable as missing the point: she is supposed to be. This is a gripping, chilling, and deeply emotional novel, showing the horrors of slavery through a fictional lens, written by someone who actually understands this pain - instead of white authors pretending they do. This book is a brutal, and honest, portrayal of the results of privilege and power. It is not a novel for everyone; it is not supposed to be. But you should read it anyway. 

Got to 50% and was just not looking forward to picking it back up. Felt like I was having to force myself to read on. Was really confusing at first trying to work out who was who and the relevance of all the different islands, none had much differentiation. Eventually I did get past that but don'  think the writing style was for me. Life's too short so its a DNF.

Queen of the Conquered is a meditation on colonialism and complicity which doubles as a slow-burn murder mystery. It handles discussions of race and slavery in a fictional setting better than I could possibly summarize in this space. Just... go read this one.

I'm frankly stunned by this book. I spent 80% of the book confident that I understood everything at stake, everyone involved... then the last part of the book just blew me away. I wasn't precisely wrong about the pieces, just very wrong about which ones were important. And that, I think, is part of the point. Sigourney spends much of the book chasing a prize which the others in power seek to deny her based on the color of her skin, wielding her own power often against the enslaved people on the island. The book conveys this tension so well and so subtly that it floors me.

The characters are complex and vivid, even filtered through the myopic lens of Sigourney's assumptions about them as the POV character. Her attention (or lack of it) is carefully managed by the author, she's not an unreliable narrator, per-say, but she is torn between competing drives and old promises. The world-building is really good, there's a lot of language specific to this book, particularly describing social relationships on the islands, but its introduced at a pace that was easy to keep up with.