This was a much slower read than I would have expected for a first-contact scifi story. Normally I expect first-contact stories to be plot-driven and action-oriented. This one instead felt like a meandering philosophical discussion of gender, ecological conservation, methods of decision-making, and the relative value of fixing a broken system or moving beyond it. Yes, there were aliens. Yes, there were interesting ideas. (Honestly, I think a lot more diplomacy would result in positive outcomes if the expectation was that people brought their kids to the negotiating table.) But a lot of this book felt like an extremely slow burn, and even the ostensible climax was mostly a rehashed discussion that had been explored to death earlier in the book. And of the two solutions that “solved” the issues, one was so obvious I couldn’t figure out why no one had raised it before, and one was so oblique I couldn’t figure out how it would help. Still, an interesting book for the ideas, if not necessarily the plot.