I loved Cloud Atlas, had high expectations for this book, and really enjoyed the start of it: holly sykes as a dense teenage girl divulging details that made the reader know her outcome month before she would. and the next narrator, hugo lam, was deliciously manipulative so that even the reader was in the dark halfway through his tale. then the 2 meet and romance and that's all good. and then - maybe it's time travellers, and that will be OK... but no - it's black and white, evil vs good, and the reader is dropped into a harry potteresque fantasy that the reader (ok - ME) felt tricked into. I can take the sci-fi parts and the dystopian stuff, but fantasy is not my thing.
still, i'll read his other stuff. I hear that his Japanese translation of 'the reason I jump' is amazing.