Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I was excited to download this novel, because based on the description it had everything I liked - high space opera, unique concepts, and big scope. I won't bore you by repeating the plot summary already provided for this book. It sounded like something different. To some extent it was. One of the things that gets a lot of discussion is the gender neutrality of the book, and the use of the term "she" to describe everyone. It's different and interesting. And, given that Breq is a humanoid instantiation of the AI that ran the ship Justice of Toren, one would expect Breq to have a much different view of gender, and to place much less emphasis on it, than biological humans born into one gender or another. However, at some point the novelty wears off. We learn the gender of some characters, but not others. Why? There's no rhyme or reason as to why it's apparently important to know in certain instances but not in other instances. In addition, there is no reason why Breq wouldn't note the gender of another person to him/herself in the same manner that he/she would note the color of the walls, without ascribing any more significance than that to the fact. However, the real flaw in this novel, and the reason why I gave it 2 stars instead of 4, is the pacing. This book is badly paced. Period. Act 1 takes up the first half of this book. And not a lot happens in Act 1. It's talky, and stuff happens, but for no apparent reason, and there is no narrative drive for anyone to do anything. "Languid" might be the most descriptive word for Act 1. Then a lot of stuff happens all at once. So I got excited, but then not a lot else happens for a while. Act 3 is crammed into about 10% of the novel, and then we get one of the least exciting and most anticlimactic "climaxes" I've read for quite some time. Then the novel just ends, at a point where you know the second novel is going to start. Finally, I felt the descriptions of a lot of the places in this novel were lacking. I had a very generic picture in my head for most of the locations, and didn't really feel transported to the exotic locations that they were supposed to be. I understand the SF novel trilogy/series, and I know it's the standard format for these things. But you have to provide some actual ending, instead of just stopping. I felt that was strongly absent here. I might read the second novel; I might not. I'm ambivalent at this point. I really love the creativity of this novel, but more polish and more editing are definitely needed.