The narrator for Mary’s sections, who has to read most of the book, is not well chosen for this project. There are so many wildly distracting mispronunciations, and the attempts at accents from Indian characters are pure cringe. And they are not infrequent.
The story is good and useful in the way that speculative fiction needs to be. It’s radical as a near-future story precisely because it is pretty calm and quotidian, following the steps world leaders are actually somewhat likely to follow if we are to arrive at a moderately good global outcome 50 years from. The book’s high drama is monetary policy and the occasional “terrorist” action, much like the world we live in. Mary’s story as the human heart of it takes this sort of calm identifiability even further, as she is a pretty flat character for us to identify with. I think with better narration her sections may have resonated better. It’s too bad, because I do think this book is a really valuable clearing of the fog of the intimidating near future we are moving into, deftly avoiding every single trope of “apocalypse” that tends to severe our broken world from whatever the next one is. This book says, you will be you in the future. A frog in a boiling pot, or a normal person working for good alongside people near you. Your choice. There will likely be no big moment where everything changes all at once.