Inheritor

This is the final book in the first Foreigner trilogy, and to me is the most solid of the three in a lot of ways.

My favorite part of this book is that Jase from the ship has landed and is trying to fit into the Atevi world. When the series starts, we are already past the point where Bren has trained his entire life to be the paidhi but the language and culture is entirely new to Jase. Bren tries to acculturate Jase, but they are at such a disconnect socially and emotionally for most of the book. Jase wants some "humanity" from Bren, and there's some question of "how far" Bren has mentally adopted being Atevi and doesn't express emotions or even uses Atevi phrase constructions in English. The disconnect and Jase's anger dovetails so well with Jase having his own secrets and ship politics happening off page that it's quite effective.

My second favorite part of this book is probably the development of Bren's relationship with Jago, such as it is. Despite being such an Atevi communicator, there's still a large cultural gap about what this means to Jago, and she is also not willing to fill Bren or discuss it either. It's a nice parallel to the pitfalls that Bren falls in considering Atevi as "friends" or "liking" them. I complained about this a little in my review of the first book, in that I feel like this isn't a series about gender or biology, and I am always a little disappointed when "I am having an emotional and sexual relationship with an alien" gets glossed over when there should be so many rough edges. It feels a little too human with too much unsaid and too much working too easily.

Finally, I do feel a little here that this is another book where Bren does not have much agency. His role is to try to smooth tensions, get Jase up to speed, and to negotiate complicated nuanced politics with old school Tatiseigi who hates the way humans have corrupted Atevi. In the end, Bren pushes for a fishing trip that he has promised Jase, but it turns out that even this wasn't of his own design.