(no subject)

After a lovely but extremely extremely busy past several weeks, I spent all afternoon hibernating on the couch reading Ocean's Echo, the follow-up to Everina Maxwell's Winter's Orbit. This one is set in a different corner of the same Big Messy Space Polity that Winter's Orbit takes place in and is really deeply and enjoyably engaged with The Problem Of Intense Telepathic Bonds: in the backstory, the military of this particular corner of space did some experiments to create telepathic soldiers who could either give telepathic commands OR read minds; in the present, command-givers have been integrated into society but mind-readers are mistrusted and frequently subject to military conscription and forcible mind-bonding to a trusted command-giver. Tennal Halkana is both an important politician's nephew and a deeply unstable mind-reader who has crossed his illustrious aunt's lines too many times; Surit Yeni is a command-giver who has been ordered to get him under control by telepathically bonding with him but is too honorably to actually do so as it is technically illegal and definitely unethical. As a result, they decide to team up and fake a telepathic mind-bond until conditions are right for Tennal to escape!

"Let's fake a mind-bond" is of course an extremely fun twist on thee trope and having read Winter's Orbit, I expected that the protags would of course fall in love along the way, but I did not expect the stakes to escalate so fast and in such big Space Operatic ways! I also really appreciated the various times and ways in which the power dynamics shifted over the course of the book, and the way in which both of them choose at various times to consciously even the playing field, ( as well as some more spoilery things )

I would be pleased if Maxwell chose to return to this corner of the universe but would also gladly explore other areas of it.