Winter's Orbit, Everina Maxwell

This was a good book.
I found the beginning upsetting to read because Kiem can't read what is going on with his new husband, and I skipped some pages from near the end that's flashbacks to Taam. All that fear hidden under all that formality.
But the story lets them fix it. Set things right and do better. So I liked that part.
And it gave some high stakes to the middle 'oh no I appear to be falling in love with my husband' bit.
The characters were vivid and good to spend time with, the romance was nice, the way they used familiar words to mean unfamiliar things was very plausible, and I liked the bits about gender markers and how they vary between cultures.
All the worldbuidling stuff was good because you get thus whole multi planetary empire and then it's like btw the neighbours are a whole lot weirder and there's literally more of them than humans can imagine.
That is not a setting that would run out of stories any time soon.
I liked how the weird tech meshed with the entirely too understandable human stuff. And how it was people stuff driving things in the end.
I liked a lot about this book.

Good to read.