It is well, clearly written, reads fast. It has great descriptions of the main character, her emotions and personal growth; it has amazing character interactions; it captures nicely how people are complicated, contrasts well how their environment and upbringing shapes them, how they have their choices and ability to change, and yet how they are not able to overcome all of their legacy. The book's story is well thought-through, fast, extremely high stakes, plays with fun ideas, and yet stays focused on characters and their emotions. Great workshop overall.
I really enjoyed looking at the story through Kyr's eyes, with her transformation as she notices and understands more and more. She's indeed a selfish bitch, and she learns to recognize it and becomes a kind person capable of sacrifice.
The problem is, she and the other characters make it look so easy: Kyr got hurt by her unquestioned system just once, and suddenly was capable of seemingly infinite and near-instant self reflection and growth. Yes, there's some inertia and illustrative circling back, but she stays in almost total control and it still seems impossible somebody now so self-aware could have spent her previous two decades of life essentially unaware of her surroundings and others and their feelings.
The story also serves as a callout and a simplified illustration of mechanisms of fascism: incorrigible yearn for power, charisma, manipulation, putting people against each other, complementary mechanisms such as reproductive control, gender binary, racism, influence through exhaustion and deprivation of basic needs. It is very direct about its humanism, offers quite clear moral guidelines. And over touches all necessary themes - including even mention of ecological issues etc - necessary to be a perfect book to win a bunch of awards. It becomes awfully obvious very early in the book that it'll be constructed this way.
Personally I am happy with that, I need that, and I think it is doing the best that's possible to give people a lot of relatable context to attach that to and to think about. FWIW, genre wise I feel it still lands more as a guilty-pleasure easy adult SFF than YA - it's too heavy and dealing with themes too dark for that tbh. So I guess some will be irked with how straightforward and direct the book is, how it simply reuses old themes and allegories, with how the characters succeed in what often seems impossible in the real world. But I don't think the book wants to uncover new philosophical frontiers - it is "just" a great entertainment, full of relatable situations, and a solid SFF themed story that's probably worth rereading.
