In addition to Flanagan’s usual awful writing of women characters (choice quote: “They were the only two females in their group”...who calls women females?) this book manages to be even more racist than Erak’s Ransom. Selethen is back, and again is always mentioned alongside his “hawklike” nose, because how else would we know he’s supposed to be Arab? But while the racism in Erak’s Ransom was mostly confined to the nose obsession, this whole book’s premise is white saviorism. Flanagan has taken essentially the Satsuma rebellion, an internal Japanese conflict (that, notably, also involved kicking out colonialist foreigners) and re-written it so the Japanese need to be saved by Englishmen teaching them Roman fighting tactics. Oh, and also the Ainu are giant hairy beasts. Glad I bought the book secondhand.