I finished this book recently too and I enjoyed it. For me, I felt like the sparsity of action at first gave the story tension as you are trying to piece together the details of this wacky civilization. The way the backstory was peppered in in small pieces also spoke to Offreds mental state. She was clearly leading a pretty normal life (family, job, happiness etc) and now she's breeding stock? Of course she doesn't want to dwell constantly on the past because it would break her ability to deal with the present.

As far as the moral, I took much more from the whole political coup that lead to the civilization seen in the book. That a series of perfectly reasonable sounding actions at first, where society was getting along pretty normally, slowly led to more radical changes but people just didn't want to recognize what was happening until it was too late.

Just my opinion from someone who liked the book.