3.5 stars, rounding up to 4. I think I went into this book expecting the whole thing to be more sinister. In a lot of ways it IS sinister: it's the story of a woman who does a job she doesn't understand and that she suspects has a net negative impact on the world. But the whole evil-is-a-boring-bureaucrat thing isn't, I think, the moral message this book leaves you with in the end.

That's not why I'm dinging it, though. I'm dinging it because when the action heats up, it gets weird in ways that, while they're aesthetically interesting, don't really seem to serve the story as it has been told up until that point. I like weird books, but in this case, the weirdness just felt unnecessary and tacked on.