Tropes:

slow burn

Steam level: none

I was expecting something more similar to Winter's Orbit, but while this is a companion novel in the same universe, they are very different. Ocean's Echo focuses a lot more on the scifi aspects of the plot rather than the romance. And it makes sense for this book—because our main characters are an architect (someone who can control minds) and a reader (someone who can read minds), consent is a tricky issue, and a quick start to the romance would have felt jarring. I'm glad that didn't happen, but this is very much a slow burn with not a lot of payoff, and I wouldn't have minded a bit more romance than what I actually got.

I didn't notice how slow the romance was progressing until about halfway through, because I was very invested in both the plot and the characters. I loved both Tennal and Surit, but Surit was my favourite. His strong sense of responsibility, his ethics and belief system, and the way he was aware of how much chaos Tennal was bringing to his structured life, but didn't do anything about it because he secretly loved it, is a combination I love. His morals and principles are the reason he and Tennal are able to develop a relationship based on trust, when it would be so easy for him to take complete control of Tennal, just because his commander tells him to. There's a constant sense of high stakes in the relationship, and I was just waiting for something to tip them over the edge of the cliff they were tiptoeing on.

The plot is based around political intrigue, coups, and the remnants that were introduced in Winter's Orbit, with an extra side of "maybe the army actually sucks", which I always appreciate. There are parts at the end that still made sense, but felt a bit flimsy and hard to compute, whereas everything else was well-structured. One thing I'm still confused about is why the author chose to make readers more feared in this world than architects. Not that reading minds isn't freaky, but mind control feels so much worse to me.