I put off this book for a long time because, based on how people were talking about it, I expected it to be a pretty complex hard scifi. But it really isn't. I would say it is hard scifi, but I was surprised by how readable it was. The concepts are all adequately explained without it feeling like infodumping. There are a lot of new terms, and there is a comprehensive glossary that explains all of them, but I honestly never referred to it. Everything I needed to know was explained within the text, or easy enough to guess from the context. 

I think it also helps that the story engine is familiar and simple: a murder mystery instead of something that relies on knowledge of the world to understand. And through the investigation into the murder of an ambassador, we discover how the empire works, and what the politics entail. I thought it was incredibly effective.

The concept of the imago-machines was a really good hook, and it also served to immediately make me feel sympathy for Mahit, who finds herself in the midst of the political games set up by her now murdered predecessor, without the tools she expected to have on hand to deal with it. It's easy to care about her and Yskandr, as well as Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea, whose existing friendship, complete with cute nicknames and banter, made them easy to like.

Even though they are colonisers.

I think that's the only thing that was really lacking for me in this story. Both Mahit and Yskandr have a love for Teixcalaan, even though they know that the Empire will always want to expand, and consume everything in its path. The Empire considers them to be barbarians, which they are fully aware of, but it doesn't change their desire to belong there and be part of the empire instead of falling outside of it. I was hoping for more pushback against colonisation—there are parts that hint at it, and it's not that Mahit isn't aware of it, which makes her personal struggle interesting and compelling. It's something I hope the author explores more in the sequel.