I enjoyed this, particularly by the end, though there were some annoyances that made me not love it. Hoid having to interject with parenthetical asides about crunchy magic physics? Pretty distracting. And I was eh on the whole

groundhog day prison thing going on

. But I enjoyed watching Yumi and Painter learn to trust each other and become closer (though if you're looking for truly romantic scenes, you'll be disappointed). 

The underlying themes of

questioning the religion you were raised in

and

the place of AI in art

came through pretty strongly, and I'm curious to see if they're part of discussions of the book. This was mostly for the better - I think the second one comes across more heavy-handedly than the first, but is still worth talking about.