Female-focused Nirvana in Fire in space!

I went into this fully expecting to love it, and indeed, I loved it - I adore revenge stories with complex plots and a mastermind protagonist, and this absolutely delivered.

Fifteen years ago, a young scholar was accused of sedition and condemned to death. Now, at the far reaches of the galactic empire, the lives of three women connected to the case become entangled: Minh, the teenage daughter of the prefect responsible for the sentence, Hoà, the younger sister of the scholar's teacher, and the mysterious Quỳnh, the Alchemist of Streams and Hills, a scholar who quickly gains access to the halls of power.

Honestly, if I have a complaint about this book is that I wanted more of it! More of the scheming and the politics, and more of the characters and their relationships, which were all fantastic and complex.

The world-building was also fantastic - this is the first book I read set in the Xuya universe, a galactic empire inspired by Chinese and Vietnamese culture and populated by sentient spaceships as well as by humans, but it definitely will not be the last.