So it turns out this is quite good. I got hit with hype aversion when it came out, and everyone immediately lost their minds, and then once that settled down, I never got around to it. (Though I absolutely adored Leckie's stand-alone fantasy novel The Raven Tower). I'd managed to stay relatively unspoiled for the actual plot, too! (Though I did see the memorial pin, because my wife has all three of them, but the writing was on the wall on that one pretty early in, anyway.)

It's funny reading this after all of the discourse around its handling of gender, and more than ten years after the fact. I had already known how the empire handled pronouns, and why it had pissed people off, and all the counter arguments about why it was Great Actually, and that one person who was trying prove all of the major characters were male and therefore the book was regressive. And it's been ten years, and generally the handling of gender in SF/F has changed. Actually reading it, I had to laugh. I don't think it was as brain-rewiringly excellent as it maybe would've been at the time, but I still enjoyed it. Especially on a meta level: With one simple trick, I will piss off every single person I dislike! Anyway, good job.

I was surprised how much of the main plot was plodging around on the ice planet drying out Breq's old lieutenant. I think I had more space adventures in my head, and found the pacing slower than I was expecting. Which is fine, I don't mind plodging around on ice planets, but I maybe wish we'd gotten to the space station a little sooner. The whole flashback storyline was excellent, though. I love the way Leckie handled the multiple points of view of the ancillaries, and how the AI's brain worked. The horror of the ancillaries themselves, the power of the empire, realising you're stuck on Good Ship Radch and the captain has lost the plot, all really well done. The mounting tension in the later sections were especially effective. I liked all the commentary about how crushing the weight of the empire's structure was, the way it poisoned even interpersonal relationships between supposed peers.
 
Just excellent work. Hope to read the second book soon.