What an abysmal book.

Before even diving into the narrative, the prose makes me wonder if an editor even made an attempt at looking this over. So much repetition. Did you know it's hot? Well guess what, you're going to find out every other paragraph, because that is quite literally how often things like that are brought up. This reads more like someone's first attempt at sci-fi without bothering to clean up the mess that was their first draft. And while I didn't mind the pacing, there were moments when the characters would keep talking and talking... and talking... and never get to the point. Really made it difficult to read.

Then there were the characters. The only one I remotely cared about died halfway through the book. It made sense for the plot, but yeah, I didn't care for anyone else. I more or less kept reading to see who else would die or be miserable in general. I don't expect there to be knights in shining armor in a dystopian book, but even the morally grey characters were meh. Did not care for Anderson. At all. I wanted Hock Seng to die two pages into his first POV chapter.

And then there's Emiko.... Sigh. I'm more furious with the author for taking a massive dump on all the female characters in this book, especially with Emiko. She could have been interesting. Instead she's first introduced via a rape scene and spends most of the book being miserable, clueless, and generally unlikeable.

Don't even get me started on the forced attraction between Anderson and Emiko. Gag me with a spoon.

There was some semblance of a story in here. I guess. You have to dig through all the worldbuilding overload to find something that makes sense and even then it isn't all that interesting. The only interesting part was literally the second to last chapter, which had me going, "OH SHIT" out loud, but that was it. I couldn't really tell you what it was actually about, but I could tell you that Bangkok is super hot. Like all the time. And everything is powered by springs. Also cheshire cats. And windups being unnatural and should die, but hot damn, they're super attractive.

To be fair, the world was interesting. There were some good ideas sprinkled throughout the story. That was it. Nothing to hold on its own, let alone with a threadbare narrative. Everything else was drivel pretending to be profound.