The first book in our group that I think no one liked. I think that it suffered from being a second book, and background seemed to be missing that may have been covered in the first book (January Dancer). Others said that the melange of languages threw them out of the book. No one really liked the characters, or the mystery of the missing mother. I liked that genealogy was a dead art. It's a far future novel, and the remains of earth culture have gotten all mixed up, Irish and Islam, pidgin english among the Terran ethnics, and I'm not sure what else because it was so difficult to tell.