I think the part of this book that I enjoyed the most was the worldbuilding dive into Presger Translators, as this is the first character with this POV. In previous books, Dlique and Zeiat both are wild characters who felt like comic relief foils compared to the over-serious Radchaai. So much of all of their nonsense along with various other mysteries get some partial explanation here. It's delightful to go back and rethink parts of previous books and have at least a slightly better understanding of what's going on. I'm not even sure that I need to know anything about the Presger at this point; I think I enjoy enough all of the wrangling in their ominous shadows.

It is definitely a wild narrative turn to have this POV though. There is a lot of body horror and casual violence going on that is treated very normally by all of the characters. It worked for me, and put a lot of the Presger Translator behavior into context, but it was also a surprising change of tone.

I enjoyed all of the characters on their own individually, but I feel like in some ways there wasn't quite enough meat on the rest of the story. It's hard for me to really put my finger on it, but if I had to pin it down to one piece, it's that I feel like Enae felt like the third wheel. Enae is handed hir investigation that nobody wants solved and the answer to a two-hundred year problem just appears right before hir. If anything, sie mostly just seems like support for Reet. I would have also wanted some more local politics or repercussions for Enae actually making progress on an investigation that some people probably didn't want solved in the end?

At any rate, in Ancillary Mercy, Provenance, and now Translation State it feels like there's a very consistent theme in this universe on the question of what makes something a Significant Species as well as legal shenanigans of how to determine who gets to be part of which species. The conclave continues and continues to come up, and I am really excited for the potential of some space politics / legal theater book wrangling all of these pieces together.