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spectru
Posted 2015-04-18 9:45 PM (#10177 - in reply to #10167)
Subject: Re: Pick and Mix 2015		Quote Reply



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Location: Fort Myers, Florida USA		Now I have finished Ancillary Justice. It is intense and compelling, except for one segment, a bit after halfway through, where it drags. This is my main complaint about an otherwise terrific book. After the main characters get to the palace station and before they meet the Lord of the Radch, the story bogs down in the nuances of the etiquette of the culture. Aside from that one part, the story keeps one reading. Up until that point the chapters alternate between the present story line and a parallel story nineteen years earlier, a story of political intrigue and treachery, that explains how the protagonist finds herself in in her current situation.

The feminine pronouns she and her are used by the protagonist and those speaking in the Radch language, where gender is ambiguous. This is, I suppose, an innovative treatment of gender, but it seemed odd, sometimes when the protagonist would refer to a character as she and someone from a different culture would refer to that same character as he. Regardless of this, I pictured most of the main characters, including the protagonist, as male, and others as female. Frankly I found this quirk of the novel to be just slightly annoying, and I think I would have preferred the conventional treatment of gender.

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