Minor romance related spoiler: The ending sort of killed that for me though… It seemed like Three Seagrass and Mahit were just going to go their separate ways which I thought was super sad. Yskander was probably my favorite character in the book although there wasn’t enough of him, and I loved Nineteen Adze. I almost wished it had more of a focus because I could have totally shipped that pair. There was a tiny, tiny bit of romance in the book. I loved the banter between Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea.
To be honest- it just feels like a stand alone with threads that went nowhere or Mahit concluded were not necessary to discover.
I don’t want to call them cliffhangers because I didn’t feel like enough tension was built into those parts for me to feel like I’m eagerly waiting the next installment to find out what happened. There are plot threads that are incomplete. The more I’m thinking about it, the more the plot sort of falls apart as a whole (I mean- I guess he needed to die so Mahit could become ambassador but that’s about it.) I feel like the other pieces of the plot were going to happen regardless if he had died or not. I say sort of because the truth of the matter is that Yskander’s death doesn’t feel like it really has anything to do with the overall outcome. The only problem is- the previous ambassador is dead, and no one from Teixcalaan will talk about it. So when her opportunity to become ambassador finally comes, she’s over the moon with excitement. She loves everything about Teixcalaan, their language, their artwork, their holovision programs, their politics and their way of speaking. Mahit (our MC) has spent her whole life training to be an ambassador from her home mining outpost (Lsel) to the Teixcalaani Empire. That one line pretty much sums up the whole book.
One of the first pages said something along the lines of: “This is for all those who have ever fallen in love with a culture that was not their own.” (Disclaimer: This has been an off year for me. I’m beginning to question whether it’s me or the books. I’m super disappointed to be giving this only three stars (no three stars isn’t bad- I’d just much rather give it four or five).
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