Lost Cause

Characters were a bit annoying at times; the language and dialogue felt either too unnatural or too pedantic.

But as a climate sci-fi story, it's always good to see authors imagining solutions and more hopeful futures instead of falling back on doom and dystopia as the default. The importance here was more in the laying out of a possible framework or series of steps it might take to get to a more just and responsible society.

Doctorow does a really good job of building out the world and the society that the main characters live in. This book still fell prey to the one complaint that I have with Doctorow's fictional writing, which is that all of the main characters (regardless of age/gender/etc) seem to speak with his voice. An example of this would be an adolescent teenage boy calling a teenage girl "a good egg". I have trouble seeing a young person actually talking like that.

However, even with that minor nagging complaint, this was a great book!