It’s a solid middle book.

Three years after the events of Amberlough, three Geddan exiles cross paths in the tropical nation of Porachis: Lillian DePaul, a press attaché blackmailed into serving fascist Gedda’s foreign service; Aristine Makricosta, a smuggler who got out of Gedda early and went (mostly) legit; and Cordelia Lehane, a railway bomber on the lam. They draw each other into a plot to do a de-kidnapping.

Donnelly, who was a debut author with Amberlough, hits her stride here. She’s ironed out the pacing issues she had with the previous book and toned down the overwrought description so it’s just lush. Middle books are hard, and Donnelly does a good job teasing out threads from Amberlough and weaving them into a setup for the events of Amnesty.

I like what she does with gender here – Porachis is a believable matriarchal society, not this. Men have some options and some room to negotiate, but they have to deal with a stereotype that women are practical and men think with their balls. Matriarchy isn’t the end of days, but it isn’t fair, either. One of the women characters chooses career over family, and Donnelly does an unflinching job of showing how that choice is hard, and has some consequences that the woman didn’t want.

Sometimes it feels like this world’s cultures are cut and pasted from Earth cultures without thought about how those cultures got there. Cordelia’s kind of Cockney, Gedda’s kind of German, Tatié’s kind of Russian, Porachis is kind of Indian, and the Chuli minority are kind of … Welsh. How did those cultures get next to each other? Which one invented the Industrial Revolution? Which one manufactures the airplanes and the cars? Which one invented democracy, and in general, how well is democracy doing on this planet?

Amberlough and Armistice are maddeningly light on specifics on what the One State Party wants. They’re supposed to be like Nazis and the main characters are disgusted like they’re Nazis, but all I ever see the Ospies do is act vaguely conservative and nationalist. I’m not convinced Ospie Gedda is worse than, like, Turkey right now. In real life Nazis made soap out of people. Maybe this gentle treatment doesn’t do justice to history. Or maybe Donnelly is biding her time. In Germany, the worst atrocities happened towards the end of the war. For Gedda, the war is about to begin.

So the geopolitics is flimsy, but the love affairs are wonderful. With the threads set up here, the conclusion of the series just might be gay Orpheus and Eurydice. That would be awesome.