Awful. Just awful. This is a bad Harlequine Romance novel wrapped in the thinnest veneer of Sci-Fi. Let me transcribe some of this crap for you...
> "You're beautiful."
>
> "I bet you say that to every naked woman you wake up in bed with."
>
> "No", he said in all seriousness. Before he realized what he'd done. Then he turned bright red. "I mean", he was too late!
>
> [Name Redacted to avoid spoilers], "Got you!" she giggled, holding him down. Then she subsided on top of him.
What. The. Fuck. This is some of the more event driven "dialogue" in the book. When our Mary-Sue-Wonder-Bread-Social-Warrior isn't spending most of her day conducting internal monologues about how she feeeeels at every moment, we get the treat of listening to this level of dialogue between herself and her compatriots.
Enough about the dialogue, let me get into the parts of the book I really hated.
HERE BE SPOILERS
Understand the culture you are in.
I really dislike it when literature treats other races/cultures/peoples by only characterizing them by the mores and beliefs that we disagree with. It is just so one sided, so arrogant; really gets my heckles up.
In this case, I was just flummoxed how our heroine is able to just waltz in and start instituting change without anyone being able to touch her because she can outfox them due to her free market understanding of how the world really works.
Question your environment
I could not buy that an investigative journalist expressed no real interest in figuring out how the locket/worldwalking worked. It just blew my mind. She didn't even ask if anyone had ever done any research on it! Come on!
Hell, I would have given her a pass if she had at least bothered to figure out the parameters, the limits of this thing. Nope, the second she figured out that it could work, we were done. After discovery, she never again bothers to test the limits of the system, to question why there is a mass limit, why do you get headaches, is their conservation of momentum? Nothing. It was just so... I just couldn't believe this. It is a good thing she dropped med school, she would have been a terrible doctor; doubt she could diagnose a cold.
Nobody cares about your feeeeeelings
I was so sick of hearing how she "wasn't going to allow them to ...." or "Let them try to get me to ...". As a verbal tick it gets old fast. The forever monologues as she connects her painfully slow reasoning made my eyes water.
The book just ends
Literally nothing is resolved at the end. It just ends. Asshole. In terms of interest, it is just dull for about 85%, then you have 10% of rising interest, and then you have a 5% ending where you realize nothing is going to complete. Wow, that made me angry.
END OF SPOILERS
I really have a hard time believing this is the same guy who wrote "Accelerando", "Rule 34", hell even "Neptunes Brood". Amazingly Bad.