Nobody warns you enough going in that this book is going to shoot you out of a cannon with zero setup. Reality here runs on a calendar, a shared social belief system that literally rewrites physics if enough people stop believing the correct rituals, and Lee explains none of it up front, you’re just expected to swim. I read the first battle scene twice, understood maybe sixty percent of it, kept going anyway, and by chapter four I’d found the groove and stopped needing the training wheels I thought I’d wanted.

The premise, once it clicks, is genuinely one of the sharpest I’ve read in military sci-fi: Captain Kel Cheris has to team up with the disembodied ghost of a genius general who’s been dead for centuries and also possibly insane, and the friction between her and his cheerful, calculating menace is the whole engine of the book. He’s polite. He’s terrifying. He wins wars by making people flinch. I kept a running note on my phone just tracking which faction believed what, the same way you’d track factions in a campaign game, because the worldbuilding rewards that kind of obsessive bookkeeping.

I’ve seen this compared a lot to Ancillary Justice, alien society, no hand holding, and I think that’s fair but undersells how much fun this one is being genuinely, unapologetically weird, fingerless gloves and geese and all. It demands your full attention in a way most books don’t ask for anymore, and I mean that as the highest compliment I can give it. Five stars, and I already bought the sequel.