This book was very flawed. I've heard the writing called beautiful, but to me it was full of cliches and stretched metaphors. Maybe that was to do with the translation but it annoyed me anyway.
I did enjoy the plot and the lesson, particularly in the first half of the novel, but it went downhill after that.
The main character, Lou, supposedly has an IQ of 160, but I just did not get that from her. Her stunted social skills seemed realistic, but the spiels about how her high functioning brain worked seemed juvenile, made up, and entirely unrealistic. The writer was obviously not a genius like Lou, so she didn't have any way to get into the head of a child prodigy. Which, in my opinion, made it a bad decision to choose to write from the point of view of one in the first place.
If I'm being honest though, my biggest issue was this book was that the love interest for 13 year old Lou was 17 year old Lucas. That just creeped me out. What is he doing chasing after girls who are said to be literally prepubescent?
And what was with that last page? It was unnecessary, confusing, and out of context - leaving me with a very bad taste in my mouth after finishing this novel.
All that said, I did enjoy reading a foreign novel, something I haven't done much of, and I liked the setting, moral, and character of No. So it does have some positives, but it was altogether just not to my taste.