Her previous trilogy was also dense and painful to read, but well written. I heard a podcast just after reading this about Decolonizing the Mind, a book by a Kenyan that I found during a wiki rabbit hole, which talked about how people need to find their own values, not just the the culture of those at the top of the (oppression) ladder. This is a good book to read on kindle, where you can just look up names of folks you don't know, and find out interesting backstories. The background is the time of the Opium Wars, which I had to look up to see how much was actual I don't remember learning much about that period in history class. The main characters are all people excluded from upper society, by their ethnicity or gender there are hints that Robin is gay, but that is never acted on they all struggle with how to change the system from within, vs outside revolution. I get a more complete view of Oxford life from this book than, say the Golden Compass, despite being at a made up college within the university. The magic here is linguistic in nature, causing lots of lovely discussions about how languages evolve, and the issues that translators face. This falls into that subgenre of alternate history, where a lot of the background information/characters are real, although there is a fantastical deviation, to tell a clearer story of British imperial inequality, the flow of money and power from other lands into England, and not back out again. Lots of early indications that it will be a tragedy. This is not a light book, or a happy book.
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