Shinn's world is strangely intriguing, although I'm not sure what her intended audience is. Given the spoilery particulars of the world, I assume it tends not to appeal so much to a devoutly religious audience. This was her usual love story (it was more satisfying the first one or two times) and this time it had more than ever of oh, the Jansai (aka the not!Muslims) are so evil and everyone hates them and they're just terrible blah blah blah. Her allegory would be more interesting if there were some more depth to, well, all the characters. I was expecting this one to be more about the women obsessed with angels and bearing angel children; part of the book was about that, but the other story overshadowed it (it should have been two separate books). Again, more depth could've been used there as well-- a little bit more social science in the worldbuilding, maybe? Anyway, I think I'm done with this author, as the entertaining escapism has now entirely worn off.

ETA: Not to mention that if you're going to really hammer on one of your parallel culture's treatment of women, you really can't more or less entirely ignore the sins of your other parallel cultures as far as that goes...