Again, again, I am plagued by a dearth of time, but this one kind of has me laughing because on the whole, I enjoyed it much more than Embassytown, but at the end - and this is where Embassytown suddenly came back for the win - at the end (I say) I just... he just... 
 It was like he had inflated this big balloon of a book and at the end he stuck a pin in it, only it didn't pop and it didn't fly around the room in noisy, flatulent glory, no, it just kind of sagged and buckled and deflated slowly into a little wrinkled pruny thing. All that for this? Bah. 
 And that's no kind of review. You deserve so much better. The sequel is squishing my brain cells, one by one.