(First of all, can we talk about this cover design? I know there's complicated issues around art use on digital releases, etc, but I really liked the space ships, and the only explanation I can come up with for this one is that no one in Orbit/Hachette's design office has ever menstruated.)

But I was very pleased with the book itself! Aliens, space battles, people trying to murder emperors, the whole bag. I do actually understand why the middle book had to be there, now, which I figured I would by the end: It's hard for Breq to worry about losing things when there's just her and Seivarden on a suicide run, so spending a book building up a community for Breq to defend worked for me.  Now I was really invested in the station being okay, and the emperor just showing up and murdering a bunch of people felt really personal. Plus the contrast to what Breq had done when she showed up was well put together.

I liked the whole thread about emancipating the stations and ships, and how the practice of that was a lot less fun than the theory, given that free people don't always do what you want. We also got lots of Breq trying to get herself killed because no one loves her anyway (not as a direct causation, but you know), and her ship and crew going, "No, we actually want you here, so knock it off." Various attempts to give Seivarden a personality transplant, also A+. I liked that she's still dealing with her issues from the first book, and she wasn't all better just because she was back in a familiar setting. I also liked that Tisarwat kept having urges to build an empire, and still hasn't found her balance after what the emperor did to her. There were just so many plots that built on what'd been set up previously, and paid off now.

Which is actually an interesting thought: Middle books are often about breaking things that the first book established, but here we didn't see that. Instead, we got a middle book making room for characters and showing them off a bit, and then spending the third book breaking them. Which is a nice change, as I'm not super fond of downer middle novels. (Though I still found a lot of the tea plantation stuff painfully didactic.)

But mostly: new delightfully weird translator. Loved her! Glad we get a whole book about the translators, even if the library doesn't yet have it yet.

It also felt like a really good place to leave the series, since we have the characters we care about set up somewhere they can probably survive, and meanwhile some fairly major societal changes are on the move, but we left them in the middle of an argument, not the empire defeated, and everyone going out to have lunch. Which worked for me and makes sense for the series.