A Letdown as Grand as Its Beginnings - A Review of Ancillary Mercy

Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


As a rule, I don’t enjoy writing negative reviews. For the most part, I tend to see them as a waste of time: I would more greatly enjoy writing about something I liked, and my readership (such as it is) would be better served reading something that recommends instead of condemns. However, ever since I started this blog I’ve tried to train myself to write about almost everything I read, if only for the sake of honesty; I can’t possibly enjoy everything I read, right? Also, there are some books that are just so vile that I feel it is a public service to tell the world jus how bad they are. Such reviews, however, are rare, as I tend to be cautious about how much vitriol I spill onto the Internet. There is enough of it out there, after all, and I tend to reserve it for books that really, really deserve it.

But there are times when the writing of negative reviews becomes especially burdensome, and that is particularly true of books that I thoroughly enjoyed initially, only to feel a profound sense of disappointment upon arriving at the end. This is worse if the book is the concluding volume of a series: one may reasonably expect the middle books in a series to be of slightly lesser or variable quality than the first and last books, but one generally expects the last book to be just as good, if not better than, the first. And when that book just doesn’t quite make it there, when it closes what would otherwise have been a wonderful story in a way that is less than satisfying, then I wonder what the point was in reading all the way to the end, only to have my memories of the story as a whole tainted by a disappointing conclusion.

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