Book Notes: Ancillary Mercy

This volume is a worthy end to the series (see my previous notes about Ancillary Justice and Ancillary Sword). In this book we get a lot more of the amusing Presger translator, and the stories and personalities of various AIs are further developed, culminating in something that I can’t tell you about because that would be spoiling the fun.

I appreciated that Leckie carefully avoids giving us a too-clean just-so ending with a bow on it. As she says, through the voice of the main character:

No real endings, no final perfect happiness, no irredeemable despair. Meetings, yes, breakfasts and suppers.

Book highlights

Think of all the griefs and tragedies, and yes, the triumphs, buried in the past, millions of years of it. Everything for the people who lived them. Nothing now.

Every ending is, from another angle, not really an ending.

No real endings, no final perfect happiness, no irredeemable despair. Meetings, yes, breakfasts and suppers.