This second book in the Teixcalaan series moves in larger circles than the first one which mostly confined itself to the politics of the world city. Most notably, this story has multiple viewpoints running at the same time, including that of the non-human alien adversaries. It is out and out space opera with those baffling aliens, enormously powerful military spaceships, technologies which are being kept secret from the Emperor herself, and a romance acknowledged in the midst of everything. In the end there are three ways of direct mental communication which were all unknown to the ordinary citizen of the Empire. The author does a decent job of raising the stakes again and again leading up to the big climax, and when early on the characters make decisions which advance the plot while at the same time seeming somewhat unmotivated, I was okay with it, because I just wanted to see how it would play out.

I wouldn't recommend reading these books out of order. While the plots are not closely intertwined, the characters who recur certainly are.

I read this as an audiobook unlike the first in the series which I consumed as an ebook, and I think this heightened the differences I felt between them. It had more examples of shared minds on the grand scale as opposed to the small scale sharing of the Stationer imago technology we learned about in the first book, by the aliens, by the Teixcalaanli shard pilots, and by their Sunlit police force. It is a mixed subject, with its obvious frightening aspects but also glimpses of how it can enrich lives too and provide a communal meaning to a group. The first part of this book portrays the villainy of the Lsel station directorate up close as the precipitating event for the characters' flight out to the battle zone, and it crops up again at the end. Charges of spying by Mahit are not new, but supporting evidence of those loyalties is. The settings are in space more often than on planets as they were in book one, although they do not feature the microgravity experience at all.

I was fine with the planet side subplots, though I didn't really understand the palace intrigue fully. It was clear that hiding information is an important motif both on the personal level and institutionally. I also don't completely understand where the aliens' motivations lay, such as why exactly they had slaughtered everyone on a colony planet even though it didn't benefit them. Maybe it was a mistake on their part? I'm not sure. The tension leading up to the climax was undercut for me because I never really believed that the atrocity being advocated would actually get carried out.

I can understand that the author's style, which emphasis the interior lives of the characters so much, might not be what everyone prefers. It is a book where no one in the halls of power say anything without calculation, in their own mind or that of an image riding along, and what a person says to you and does not say is subjected to deep analysis, even when a person is in the throes of death. Rarely does anyone say a line of dialogue without a heavy dose of premeditation, which plays well for readers that are that way by temperament too, maybe not for everybody. I will be looking forward to the next thing coming from her along with the fans, however, whether it is set in this universe or something completely new.