It reads as a backwater boy gets thrown into intergalactic espionage, but I particularly liked the setup for a planet of nothing but men eventually becoming the galaxy's largest repository of something that would spoil your reading of the book if you learned about it before-hand. 
 As sci-fi as social commentary, it wasn't very deep, but it did have significance for the eighties. 
 Overall, the novel was intended and succeeded at being a light adventure, but I'm slightly shallow in what I want from Ms. Bujold. I wanted more Miles and he was just referred to several times only. That's really quite okay, though, because our heroine was quite a handful.