I was not expecting the Hydrogues to be declared defeated before the end of the series, and with how it was portrayed I don't expect them to resurge. I mean, the last few chapters set up that Faeros/Klikiss/Robots/Basil are going to be our leading baddies for the next installment(s), but this started with the Hydrogues and I had anticipated it ending with them too.

Urdu'h will be missed. He was a terrible person, but he was also clever, and did all the worst things for all the best reasons. In books 1 and 2 he was just flat evil, but he really came into his own in book 4, I thought. He deserved what he got from Osira'h and probably from the mob as well, but I'd rather hoped he'd stick around.

I also really like Fitzpatrick's growth and arc. He could have just been a stock 2d bully, but he actually got character traits, and learned something, and is making efforts. What can I say? I like it when we get some nuance to characters that could be left as cardboard cutouts.

I... Wow. This was a great book, but it was also a hard book for me to read. I love the baseline story of the Snow Queen, which is kind of the skeleton upon which Vinge's novel is built. But wow, the places she goes with this... like Vernor Vinge in A Fire Upon the Deep or A Deepness in the Sky she creates a deep, exotic universe and then draws you into it not with a pure mystique of philosophy and 'facts', but with a cast of characters who, for all that they're part of this fantastical universe, feel incredibly real in a way the constructs that populate the Saga of the Seven Suns, entertaining and likable or hateable though they are, never do.

And that made this a hard book to read. In A Fire Upon the Deep, the struggle is very large. While you're drawn in by the characters, the sheer scale of events is one that helps dilute some of that, and when the characters suffer it's usually mixed with some sort of mystery or triumph. A Deepness in the Sky was a good deal more personal, and there were times when I found myself feeling profoundly uncomfortable because the trials the characters were going through. But almost always, there was another line of the story to draw me along, and I read Deepness in comparitivley short sittings, which also mitigated (for better or worse) the effect.

To compare to another book I've read this year... I remember some people commenting on All the Windwracked Stars being a hard book to read, because there's a lot of suffering going around for pretty much all the characters and only just enough redemption, at the end. But I didn't really have trouble with All the Windwracked Stars because Muire, Cathoair, and The Grey Wolf were products of a world that was going to kick their teeth in whenever it pleased. They fought, they resisted. Sometimes, the world won, but even when it did there was a chord running underneath it... In any case, I could take it.

There were a few points where I just had to put The Snow Queen down for a minute, and wait for the suffering to pass. Get out of that universe, and those characters I was empathizing with so much. Like All the Windwracked Stars, even moreso than that novel, there's redemption and a happy ending to be earned, but the narrative is not one of resistance and survival against an uncaring world, it's one of separation, loss, and corruption. And that's harder to shake, because the characters are forced to change more in response to what they must endure.

So it's a very good book -- maybe not the same degree of favorite for me as the Vernor Vinge novels I've read, but good -- but also, in my opinion, but also not for the faint of heart.