1.5/5 I grade on a curve, and a 2 is "ok".
I read an article last year, showing statistics that more people want to be writers, but fewer people want to read, and I wondered what the books written by the non readers would look like. Now I know.
I bought this after it appeared in a "Best SF of the year"- type blog post, and didn't know anything about either the book or the author, so after reading the first chapter, I was wondering to myself if this was written by someone who isn't a native English speaker, and whether this writer had an editor at all. I stopped reading briefly, noticed it's self published, which I guess increases the likelihood that it's not edited.
The language is, well, bad, with a lot of mixups, like using diffusing instead of defusing, embroidered instead of embroiled, Darth Vader gets misspelled as Vadar, stationery instead stationary, etc etc. Sometimes this gets unintentionally hilarious, during an argument someone yells
"Are you outside your mind?"
Language issues aside, the whole thing is alternating chapters of 1st person POVs, which works okay in the first half of the book, but their voices are similar enough that if they don't keep going on about their schtick, some of them are hard to tell apart.
The main plot twist is The Watchmen's, the main villain is a feminazi, the character supposed to be most likeable lists "women" as one of three "amenities" he misses, the one black character thinks he's not like other black people because he's married to a white woman (!??).
I'm not a military SF purist by any means, my suspension of disbelief doesn't hinge on alien science and technology lining up 100% with theoretical physics (I'm not even going to touch on why there's fish on an alien planet, nevermind that the air is breathable), but not even getting how the internet works right will take me right out of the story. Having one data center for the entire world is so mindbogglingly stupid for a number of reasons. The latency alone would be hell.
There's also stupidity about how wigs work, how wearing heels work, how telecommunications work, how background checks work, how sociopathy works, there's two(!) musical breaks that quote a lot of lyrics verbatim, which was annoying to read, but more importantly for the author, is copyright infringement.
I will say that the ending was nicely wrapped up, so I don't feel the need to read the second book. With a good editor this could be a passable beach read type thriller. I find myself not wanting to be too harsh, because it's self published, it feels like being cruel to someone who just started writing, but Hugh Howey started out self published, and there's so much fanfic out there with infinitely higher literary value.
For more literary versions on the same theme, try The Word For World is Forest, Watchmen, or Ender's Game.