Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I loved Ancillary Justice. The characters were great, the timing and plotting were incredibly thought out, subtleties were important but not pushed too hard, and there was a climax. I hate to say it, but this book was disappointing. AJ was able to be an intimate character study, introduce this foreign concept of ancillaries and ship AIs, and make us care and sympathize with ancillaries, and also play out a plot on an epic scale. AS does none of those things. No new concepts, no important plotline, no Anaander Mianai throughout the entire book, and no recourse for the murder of the Presger translator. How is that not where this book went? Who cares about a corrupt captain smuggling ancillaries? That would get two paragraphs in AJ. I love the omnipotent/multiple viewpoint Breq has, and the way it allowed situations to unfold in the first novel, but AS just does it because it feels obligated to. The pieces don't really intermingle, it's really just a mechanic to have three unrelated stories going on. The second book in a trilogy is what makes it a trilogy. It expands the scope, shifts the momentum, introduces twists to issues that seemed resolved previously, and sets some expectation for the final piece. This book unfortunately did none of those things. Also, the gender thing, which was jarring (in a good way) in the first novel, just didn't make sense in this one. What's the penis festival about? And if you're going to go directly at the issue of "so are there men and women?" why is there not an actual answer? I like the "she" as a standard pronoun use and it frankly made me realize a big bias I didn't realize I had, but there was no similar mechanism in this book. AJ was so great that I'll read the third anyways, but this was a big letdown. I realize it was a hard act to follow AJ, but this felt mailed in.