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The basic premise is that a young researcher arrives for her first job on a planet which has an indigenous alien population as well as a human colonial settlement. The aliens are all female with two different dimorphic female sexes, one that can reproduce via parthenogenesis and one that theoretically can sexually reproduce, except there are no longer any males.
So yeah, great science fiction premise. In general, fantastic stuff. If you like science fiction I highly recommend this author, in general.
However, this book could have used another hundred pages to breathe a bit. I do like short, to-the-point books and don't want every mystery explained, but there's a lot going on here and we don't get to spend much time with it. Some time fleshing out the ruins and what was happening culturally back in the day, or more time with aspects of the current alien culture, or a lot of stuff that was told as exposition about events in the past elsewhere, or maybe digging a bit deeper into the colonists and their motives, would be good. As-is, we're just getting a glimpse.
But anyway, I am not dissatisfied - I just want more.
In terms of difficulty: There are a lot of words. It's not crazy-hard or anything, but the prose is expressive and I found some exposition a bit confusing on the particulars. Not difficult for science fiction in general though.
Content warning: The rape of a child is a plot point - it's not directly portrayed, but the way it's indirectly portrayed is still disturbing (in an intentional way).