Well, the book really is about a naked man and some kind of silly cat people. And some Skeksis. But there’s no need to splash that all over the cover. I mean, I do readers’ advisory. People would start to wonder.
I had that one. Enjoy :p.
I’m a horrible hypocrite. I tend to get annoyed at writers like the late Vonnegut who would haughtily dismiss any suggestion that they might be writing “genre fiction.” Snobbery of the worst kind, sez I.
Yet…I still get very slightly embarrassed buying the occasional pulpy-looking sf novel at bookstores and always feel better if I’m picking up something “legitimate” at the same time. Ah, sweet, silly, childish shame - how could we live without it? 
It’s actually a fun romp. If you can get past the fact that Cherryh’s protagonist race = talking, quasi-feudal, capitalistic ( or perhaps mercantilistic? ) lions, complete with a lion social-system, then they’re pretty enjoyable as action-packed space opera ( with the requisite complex political intrigue ). The first book is the shortest and probably the weakest, but still pretty decent.
I forgot how fun it was. One excellent thing about Cherryh is that although she doesn’t write what I’d call “hard sf”, the technology is generally well thought out - the ships make sense, their movement and action is consistent, etc. She always follows her own rules.
There’s a sequel coming out in January.
Sure, she is a careful writer and she used elements of the setting as a framework, but not the whole of the background. The “filling in the blanks” effect probably wouldn’t actually work for most people because there are a lot of things that you wouldn’t notice unless you knew quite a bit about Japan. Actually, she makes the contrast between Atevi and real life Japan work even for people who do know by throwing in a very odd difference here and there to startle you out of thinking that they’re just tall ebony-skinned Japanese. I’m certain that she’s doing exactly what she wants to with those details.
She is part of the space opera mafia . Keep the scifi simple and go heavy on the politics. I never paid much attention to the chanur series and loved the foreigner series ,but I think she let that one go to long with the trip to the new alien planet.
Declan
Exactly - not too much you can say about a long space journey with no complications and then some mildly-interesting-but-kinda-boring stuff in the middle where Our Hero shows off his Amazing Intercultural Communications Skills. Yawn. But then they go back to the planet and run around on mechieti-back some more, so things perk up.
The sci-fi is simple but always well done - she gets a lot of mileage out of communication lag and momentum.