This book is Valente at her most uninhibited and uncontrollable, full-on max verbiage, glam-stylist run-ons galore, totally self-indulgent and rocking out with her pen (word processor?) out. And it is very OUT in being challenging to read, and parse, but also OUT in how artsy, non-binary and weird she would like the galactic glam outworlder communities to be. Probably not worth your time if you expect to encounter again her languorous, luxuriously lush, precise prose of the past, as it's more manic overload this time than anything else - quite suitably for the subject matter and style nonetheless. I feel the plot rushes forward in double-quick tempo, even despite the digressions filling out the strange denizens of the wider glam Galactic, and yet it all too quickly ends with a strangely and probably undescribable-anyway climax. It felt like the journey barely begun as the last sentence rolls off, and the characters barely show much of themselves beyond their neon-fluoresecent outlines. This book feels like it is more a world-building exercise, but one has to respect the author's effort to imagine a Technicolor alternative to the staid, very straightlaced, hard SF first contact novels out there. And building out our wild, yet on-rails, theme park ride experience within it.