First and foremost: An interesting idea, well-executed. Well worth reading.
This is very early Cherryh, and she’d not fully mastered her craft. Though the aliens–and the strangely-alien humans, for that matter–are well-imagined, and brought to convincing life, Cherryh hadn’t yet developed the extreme character focus-‘intense internal third [person],’ she calls it–which drives her best books.
This short review was originally published on LibraryThing.