I may be in the minority but I found the protagonist to be insufferable. Someone who’s trying to be edgy but comes off cringy with the whole hacker-elitism belief that she’s so much smarter than everyone else. At the same time worrying about wearing Elliot Alderson style getup to make sure everyone knows how smart she’s is and that she is not concerned with appearances. Her entire personality is vapid and self centered, the only reason why she cares about anyone is solely based on how good they make her feel and anytime she starts feeling any negative emotion she simply “compartmentalizes” it, a word the author uses over and over. Some of the over the top non-sense coming out of the character is legitimately eye-rolling like this little statement:
“Oh. I tried not to pay much attention to US politics-after all, most of what I hated about present-day America was stuff I helped to invent.” It doesn’t stop there. One moment the character stresses that she “had zero fucks to give about face” because she knows who she is, and not even a page later retelling exaggerated stories of her work that made her sound like superhero to her mother all the while questioning who she was trying to impress. 
In addition the author seems to have a solid grasp on technology but every once in a while sprinkles in stuff that makes you realize he may not know a whole lot after all. He explains MySQL database as “an open-source database used by everyone in the world except greedy contractors who wanted to mark up Oracle licenses…”, which comes off as someone who knows the right jargon, the right words, and tools but doesn’t really use them. The small lapses add up to undermine the credibility of the “elite “infosec” baddass the immature main character is supposed to be.
Even though the author attempts to evolve the main character the effort feels off. I felt that at any moment she would revert back to ethically dubious choices whenever her own own comfort and livelihood were actually threatened.
Part of me hoped that having knowledge of information security would mean I would enjoy this book a bit more that the average person but it actually turned out the opposite in my opinion. While the plot may have some promise when it finally shows up, over all it’s hard for me to recommend this book because of the shallow protagonist and disjointed technical knowledge of the author.