It took me a long time to finish this book, well over a year, even though I really liked the first part of it where the key players are introduced. The worldbuilding here is thorough and ambitious, with much of civilization pushed up towards the poles owing to climate change, corporations which are the global power players, and an understanding of what is normal and expected for humans and for bots. I had a harder time focusing in on the settings and some of the characters, maybe because they were both somewhat alien to me and in some ways not different enough from the way places and people seem in our own world with our own current preoccupations. The depiction of how bots think and feel was the most interesting part to me. I don't know if I'm qualified to say a lot about the way the author develops an analogy between human-bot relationships and gender roles in our own time since it is so far from my experience. I was surprised that the ending took such a happy tone for the characters considering how much violence they had to go through over the course of the story.

There are several scenes of torture and brutality in the course of interrogations, which bothered me because they didn't lead to any consequences for the ones committing those acts. More than the mind manipulation through pharmaceuticals and the pervasive surveillance, the moral code I could glean from what happened in the two timelines in this book were frightening to me for the way characters could just be taken out with just the barest mention of their passing. At the climactic fight scene, I really could not tell who was going to survive among the combatants, and not sure whether the ones I liked really ought to end up as survivors either.