Somebody in a comment thread compared reading this to picking up a new video game with zero tutorial and just getting thrown into the deep end, and I thought that was an exaggeration until I actually started it. First chapter alone throws Sobornost, gogol, zoku, Oubliette, exomemory at you with zero handholding, and I had to just accept I wasn’t going to fully track the worldbuilding for the first fifty pages and trust it would come together.
It mostly does. Jean le Flambeur is a master thief broken out of a prison where his own fractured personality’s been trapped replaying a version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma forever, which is a genuinely great opening hook, and he’s sprung by a warrior named Mieli who needs him for a heist on Mars, in a moving city called the Oubliette where citizens spend their memories as currency and privacy itself works completely different than anything I’ve read before. Once the pieces click, and for me that was somewhere past the hundred-page mark, the plot moves like an actual heist story should, tight and layered.
Where it lost points with me: the density never really lets up even once you’re oriented. I kept a running note on my phone of terms I needed to look up mid-chapter just to follow what was happening, which isn’t something I usually need for a novel. Renata read it after me and finished in half the time I did, said the trick is to stop trying to understand every term the first time it shows up and just let the meaning arrive from context two chapters later. Wish I’d known that going in, would’ve saved me some backtracking.
Slim book, 330-some pages, but it reads twice that length because of how much work you’re doing per page. Worth it for the heist and the setting once it clicks, but I can’t call this an easy recommend. Bring patience.