It is a truth universally acknowledged that no one can write like Douglas Adams. Valente knows that, which is is why she writes like Cat Valente in the flavor of Douglas Adams and it is brilliant in its own right and far better than had she tried to be Adams. She has his sense of the whimsy, his magical ability to take a metaphor and turn it into a shaggy dog story all without losing the metaphor. And she knows the role of the absurd in fiction.
That said, Valente lacks some of Adams' cynicism, though her pointed observations about the human race are no less biting than Adams, the sense of hope that she brings to her writing does not obscure all the terrible things that she notes, but cuts through them like the glass of a disco ball and takes you out the other side, a bit bloodied, but triumphant. It's kind of genius.