Not sure what to make of The Giants of the Violet Sea. The setting is a colony on an inhospitable world where most life is toxic to the colonists. One of these toxic life forms is highly revered--the Venedolphin. More like a whale, and the colonists understand it to have a complex social structure. But they are being poached. The protagonist is a girl child of a Venedolphin tamer and a healer. The society has structured gender roles so she could not be a tamer, but didn't want to be a healer like her mother so she left for a time. She comes back to solve the mystery of her brother's death.
The story is mostly confusing and kind of hard to follow. There's a lot of side issues, like a more-favored sister colony that seems to have ruined its environment, that are introduced but don't really go anywhere. In the end it all resolves but it's in a kind of awkward space where the author needed a lot more space to develop it all, or a lot less plot. It's also a bit awkward to read for a major award nominated story.
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