It was good! The setting is fantastic! There are smaller versions of atoms, and there are smaller humans and rabbits built from these. The smaller humans have the same number of atoms and the same weight as the big ones. They are just small. And fast. And sweat a lot. And hear/see higher frequencies.

This gives the setting a lovely sense of familiarity (gnomes!) and novelty (they can walk through steel walls!).

Perhaps to add a dose of normalcy, the technology and society is mundane. They make phone calls, hire private detectives, write to the council, and worry about road works. I think that's reasonable. But perhaps a few interesting technologies could have added a dose of cool! One pervasive setting-specific technology is rescalers. But they just make conversations between scales more mundane.

Same with the characters. They are all very sensible. You know how annoying it is when a character in a book does something silly that they could have avoided by thinking for a second? Well somehow the opposite can be annoying too.

The plot is okay. A bit too sensible, haha! Like, the big secret technology is discovered in a laboratory trial stage, far from any world domination-stage trials. (That's okay.) The plot structure is a bit haphazard. Of course we jump between the scales and that's cool. But it's basically a tiny glimpse of Scale 1, a good dose of Scale 4, and then 80% Scale 7. So unfair! I think I'll go protest against those shifty little gnomes!

I had one question throughout the book: Scale 1 is not the same as rootlife, right? It's already half that. So what happened to rootlife humans? I expected to find out the horrible truth at the end, but no. Looks like I will have to make up my own horrible theory!