Nix is trying to pull a Jo Walton here: He's set his story in the 1980s and peppering all the settings with specific details about books and authors from the era, in what I can only assume is a nostalgic paean to his youth. The problem, though, is that the book is clearly a YA story: It's about a teenager looking for her father, and the plotting, dialogue, and characterization have the sort of straightforward simplicity that are characteristic of many YA novels. (Not all! The Chaos Walking series avoided it, and Frances Hardinge is incapable of simplicity.) But teenage readers are not going to have the nostalgia of the 1980s, and adult readers (like myself) are going to find the shallowness of the story tedious. 

In any case, even if I had been alive in 1983*, and the simplicity of the narrative didn't bore me, Nix doesn't even do the nostalgia right. When we got to a full paragraph describing a bookshop window full of new publications, dutifully listing each display by author and title, I was done.

I know that Nix is beloved because of his Lirael/Sabriel/Abhorsen series, but they also bored me because of the simplicity and predictability of the plot. I think that Nix in general just isn't for me.