This book did a lot of things right: I loved the creepy, horror-esque tone of Sigourney's visions and the confusion between what's real and what's imagined. I loved the morally-ambiguous (if not flat-out villainous) main character. I appreciated that the writing didn't pull any punches when depicting colonial slavery, but didn't veer into voyeuristic misery or torture porn. I think the story overall did a great job of exploring questions of complicity and privilege, and making me think about all the shades of grey between "oppressed" and "oppressor".

With that said, those strengths make me all more sad about the ways the book fell short. I always felt like I was being kept at arm's length from the story and its characters. Some of it is because most of the stories we hear are thoughts and memories of other characters, told rather than shown. The bigger problem is that Sigourney just doesn't reflect or grow - there's no sense that anything she learns or experiences in the book changes her in any way. We spend very little time on her emotions or reactions to events because she's so focused on her goal and that's what everything else comes back to. Ultimately it makes her harder and harder to relate to as the story goes on.

Spoiler

The ending, too, was predictable and rushed. I wish we'd seen Sigourney slowly putting the clues together and uncovering the truth over a few chapters, lingering on her realization that she's been completely wrong and now she's in danger... instead we're kept in the dark until the last minute, when we get a classic "villain explains his dastardly plot to the hero" denouement.