We're not going to talk about how long it took me to figure out she was [a:Daniel José Older|5137530|Daniel José Older|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/authors/1336535512p2/5137530.jpg]'s sister. Duh. Next time, read the acknowledgements.
Anyway, I really enjoyed this one. It's a bit outside my comfort zone - near future thriller isn't really my thing, but people keep having these amazing premises and then falling down on the execution. Fortunately, Older doesn't. I found this evolution of the burbclave/phyle approach (see Stephenson) to be an intriguing and realistic update of the fall of the nation state. And I also like that she presents a world that is better than this one while still being problematic. It's not a utopia, but it's also not a facile middle-grade novel where everything looks great, but it turns out no one has autonomy. Her approach - what are the problems with this system - crafts a story around how humans can screw things up and is unabashedly about that rather than a heavy handed critique of technology. And in doing so, she manages a much subtler and more complex conversation about the availability of information, the idea that data are somehow neutral, what it means to think or rethink democracy and, somehow, Brexit. Still not sure how that last worked out.