I was hopeful of the idea as I generally enjoy stories with hun=man/alien communication as a central thread, but this was just dull. Every story was in the same flat tone with a fairly obvious resolution. There seemed to be no awareness of any science, and to say she's a linguist, not much exploration of different ways of communication. I couldn't be bothered to finish it. ( )

I really REALLY liked the premise of this book - that human/other-species communication doesn't just happen by magic, and there's a whole world of stories to be told around the development of xenolinguistical study/structure and cross-cultural understanding. I would've appreciated one long more-in-depth novel on the topic, but the short story format really worked for spanning the advent and development of xenolinguistics. ( )