This book took a bit to get into - while I enjoy a book that just starts and doesn't use exposition, it does make it difficult to get into at first. Take the time though - it is worth it.

The two main characters are Go Jung-hwa (HWA to her friends) and the oil rig/city of New Arcadia off the east coast of Canada. Oh, there are other people in the book, but these are the stars.

First, Hwa - I liked her a lot. She's a kickass bodyguard for the United Sex Workers of Canada, tough, and has a moral center despite all odds of her upbringing. She has an embryonal development anomaly known as Sturge-Weber Syndrome which causes headaches, seizures, and a whole host of other medical complications, including an extensive port-wine birthmark which marks her face to such a degree facial recognition scanners can't read her.

New Arcadia is a company town in the Atlantic Ocean, and is an oil rig, a frontier town, and a corporate facility all rolled into one. I both like it, and would hate to live there. Like many one service towns, New Arcadia is always at the mercy of the market, and purchased by the Lynch Corporation before the start of the book, the whole town is nervous as they wait to see what will happen next.

Everyone else comes and goes as interesting data points with no real feeling of depth. Joel, who Hwa is hired to protect, and Daniel, who hires her, have full dimension and development but Hwa's friends and family are more directly plot driven, appearing only as devices moving the story along.

The plot has a lot of moving parts which come together with grace at the end, but there is a definite feeling in the last chapters of being rushed, and that is the books only real weakness. I feel like the story got crumpled to fit within a page count rather than unfolding to a natural conclusion. Because of this, the handling of the antagonists seemed startlingly abrupt.

Overall, would very much recommend to someone who enjoys earthbound near futurism. The world is well visualized, the cast diverse, the issues thorny and I enjoyed every minute of reading.