There is a scene, one third of the way into Ancillary Justice, where the protagonist and narrator explains her goals and motivations to another character. That scene takes place off-page, and the reader will only begin to learn that information another hundred pages later. This is only the most egregious example; there are tons of details that the author only explains fifty pages too late.
I’ve read a lot of science-fiction and I’m perfectly fine with the “figure it out yourself” style of world-building, but this is different — this is trying to be Lost or Westworld, deliberate opaque, ostensibly hiding things from the audience. And that’s fine on TV but it doesn’t work at all, for me, in a book told in the first person; that just makes the narrator incredibly obnoxious.
Still, the book and its story are pretty clever, you have to love how much attention it pays to subtext and subtly expressed emotions, and the portrayal of One Esk is well thought-out and interesting. But I don’t remember ever being so annoyed at a book I couldn’t put down.
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