Provenance

480 pages

Published July 10, 2018 by Orbit.

ISBN:
9780316388658

View on OpenLibrary

4 stars (3 reviews)

Following her record-breaking debut trilogy, Ann Leckie, winner of the Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke and Locus Awards, returns with an enthralling new novel of power, theft, privilege and birthright.

A power-driven young woman has just one chance to secure the status she craves and regain priceless lost artifacts prized by her people. She must free their thief from a prison planet from which no one has ever returned.

Ingray and her charge will return to her home world to find their planet in political turmoil, at the heart of an escalating interstellar conflict. Together, they must make a new plan

2 editions

It's a good book, not a great book. (Audiobook review)

4 stars

Provenance is the last book I had to read in the Imperial Radch universe. I almost didn't listen to it until someone told me so, because when I first hit play, it seemed quite unrelated). For the most part, it is unrelated to the main trilogy, though events are alluded to in parallel.

It's a good book, with the worldbuilding charm of the other Imperial Radch books. It's a fun, amusing, and dramatic adventure. I think there are the groundworks for this to be a prison abolition movement, though the book never quite gets there.

Ultimately, I found the twists and turns a little too predictable to be impressed. Characters do what I expect early and later on what I expect them to do, with a level of privilege and immaturity I don't have sympathy for. I usually like how things all thread together by coincidental relations by the end …