This is a near future story about Beck Garrison, a precocious teenager growing up on a libertarian seastead off the coast of California. Her part-time job is finding things (or people) for others, and this work gets her into things and places she's not supposed to, all while trying to stay out from under the eye of an overbearing father.

It's also got: Reality shows! Unions! (Un)believable backlash against said unions! Shitty controlling parents! Mad scientists!

This book certainly gets at everything you suspect would go wrong with a libertarian seastead. What situations would cause people to flee the United States to go there? What kind of immoral shady behavior would people get up to? What terrible capitalism is everybody living under? What sort of a sham of worker's rights even pretends like it exists here? BUT, if that were all this book were about, it'd be just another good book in the overflowing "capitalism is bad, actually" pile.

What works in this book especially for me, is that Beck likes the seastead she's grown up on (even as she moans about not getting to ever leave like her friends have). She cares about making it better. People listen to her. She has leverage to make things better, and goes out of her way to help people when she has the power to. I think her care for a place that is both broken and also hers makes the story work; it feels like a metaphor for our own broken and messy places that we still want to try to fix.