At times the intrigue of Shelley Parker-Chan's She Who Became the Sun is a bit tough to follow (I needed a Dramatis Personae), but overall this is a beautifully-written exploration of gender, politics, ambition, and desire in 14th century China with some mild fantasy elements. I think there's even an interesting sort of thought experiment about Buddhist conceptions of desire and suffering to be found.
Reading Becky Chambers is like having a nice cup of hot cocoa under a cozy blanket. As I said about one of her other books, it's not space opera, it's space chill-wave. But it also makes you think and feel new and interesting things. While this isn't the only science fiction book I've read with almost entirely non-human characters (Iain M. Banks's Look to Windward comes to mind), Chambers does really interesting things with this idea, like exploring ideas of otherness and forming relationships across lines of difference, and maybe the most amazing thing is that she does all this without giving up her patented coziness.
