A young woman who's studying in the more urbane society of Mars struggles to navigate her identity and her belonging.

The Orkney News made favourable comparisons between elements of the story and life on Orkney, such as bad internet speeds, but felt the ending was unsatisfying and the cast list excessive. Little languages, especially those thought of as rural and peripheral, are often cast as dwindling languages of the past.

There's probably a lot of different ways to read the book with its dual text, and though I settled into reading each page first in the Orkney and then English, I could imagine trying out different ways in the future. Caulking the narrative with a sense of Orkney and technology, which is indubitably a valid concern, does not give a great degree of depth to the story. They also harvest hulks, what appear to be alien spacecraft found trapped in the gravity well of the huge planet.

As a person living in Orkney (but not coming from Orkney), I was grateful for the translation, but as I got into the swing of reading the original, I felt I needed the translation less and less.Joining Butler on the judging panel were the British Science Fiction Association’s Crispin Black and Stark Holborn, the Science Fiction Foundation’s Phoenix Alexander and Nicole Devarenne, and Nick Hubble of the Sci-Fi-London film festival. Through them all you get a snapshot of the daily struggles and doubts, as people make everyday decisions that keep their community alive, while some wonder where the community will be in the years ahead. I particularly loved the translation style, which takes so much care to express the range each Orcadian word holds, preserving as much nuance as possible. Giles is attempting to give literal translations by combining English words to define their Orcadian counterparts. Writing against English -- sharp against the background of English dominance, raging against the false inevitability of English glossophagy -- seems less like the exception and more like the norm.