Judith Proctor's Journal

I read this book, then I read it a second time. Then I bought the sequel and read that twice, and likewise the third volume of the trilogy.

It's very well written, and I missed quite a bit the first time around, as there's lots of depth to the culture and also to the plot.

One one level, the story in 'Ancilliary Justice' is almost simple. Breq rescues someone from freezing to death and goes with them on a quest to find a weapon to kill the person responsible for the death of someone she loved.

Except that Breq isn't human. She looks human, and her body was human at one time, but
Breq is a ship. The last surviving part of the troop carrier 'Justice of Toren'. She's an ancilliary - a human with implants that slave the body totally to an AI, in this case, 'Justice of Toren'. The conversion is total. Almost nothing remains of the mind/person that once inhabited her body. The ship itself is gone, destroyed by the leader of the Radch in an attempt to remove evidence of a political threat.
But as far as Breq is concerned, she IS the ship.
I say 'she', but one of the interesting things about the Radch language is that it is gender neutral, and clothing has no gender clues in Radch culture. Everyone is referred to as 'she'. You only every find the physcial gender of a character if Breq is speaking a different language. Breq often feels out of her depth in other languages, because she has to guess at gender in order to get pronouns right, but clues as to gender vary with different cultures...
Seivarden, the person she rescues, is eventually referred to as male, but we never do find out Breq's gender.
It's actually quite fascinating, because it makes you as a reader aware of how much gender stereotyping you do unconsciously.

One of the things I like about this series is that people do not change overnight. Not even when you save their life.
Seivarden comes from a noble family, and tends to look down on everyone else automatically. She expects privilege, and has severe mental health issues owing to accidentally ending up in cryosleep for a thousand years and waking in a time where her family no longer have influence.
The only being who remembers who she was is Justice of Toren. And Justice of Toren never actually liked Seivarden when she served as a lieutenant on the ship...
It's quite a while before Seivarden learns who Breq is, and she will try to change her thought patterns, but it's not easy to shake off the patterns of a lifetime.

This book won a Hugo, it's not hard to understand why. Highly recommended.