My friend Sam recommended this to me, and I would have finished it earlier if not for my copy of Nona the Ninth coming in. I was somewhat surprised that this was Ada Palmer’s first novel—it sets up a very rich world with multiple layers of narration and Palmer is clearly having fun tugging the reader’s sympathies this way and that with nuanced characters. There was quite a bit of resonance with Nona with respect to how each book plays with the presentation of characters’ gender—Lightning is quite overt in how it interrogates this via direct address to an imagined future reader in the book’s world. I’m already awaiting my library hold of the next volume in the series.