The lush prose, the fascinating characters, and the wonderful world building that holds a mirror to the problems of citizenship and ubiquitous surveillance — those things kept me going even when the pacing faltered, dragging or rushing at different points, the motivations of characters grew a bit too concealed from the reader, and the lushness veered into purple prose and creative language use stepped into malapropisms. I think these are all problems of scale. I liked Sriduangkaew’s shorter pieces a lot more, and here I felt like the structure and pacing of a short story or novella was expanded to novel size. But a novel needs a different structure, not just to be longer. It’s an uneven book, and worth reading for the good parts, by which yes, I do also mean the incredibly wonderful queer sex scenes. I think it might have worked a lot better for me, even with the pacing issues, if more of the exposition happened during sex scenes, where a bit of indulgent purple prose isn’t so bad.