The Red Scholar's Wake

 The Red Scholar's Wake by Aliette de Bodard, 336 pages.

When Xích Si is captured by pirates she expects to be murdered or indentured into service, in either case she won't be able to ever go home to her daughter again. Instead Rice Fish, Mind Ship and leader of the Red Banner pirate fleet, offers her a much stranger deal. If Xích Si helps her to investigate her wife's mysterious death, she will marry her (for her own protection) and make sure she has everything she needs. Xích Si is soon pulled deeply into the politics of the five pirate banners, and the walls seem to close in from every side.

I thought this Vietnamese-inspired space opera felt very fresh and interesting. Unfortunately, I also found many of the actual science fiction aspects hard to understand, which made it much harder to follow. More unfortunately, this is a book with an emotional conclusion that I found so flawed it made me retroactively dislike the rest of the book more. It had many elements that I like individually, but they came together in a way that felt lacking. This book was very interesting, but I'm not sure if I would call it good.