Palmer teaches medieval history to college students, and it shows: "Too Like the Lightning" feels as though it was written for readers encountering these ideas (gender beyond binary, transgressive religion, questioning power structures) for the first time. The book might feel revelatory to them. For anyone with any kind of background in social sciences, philosophy, organizational behavior, or critical theory, it's overlong and under-rewarding.
But the core problem isn't the audience mismatch. It's that Palmer has written a book describing totalitarianism and presented it as a utopia -- but nobody in the book seems to know the difference.
Mycroft is established as an unreliable narrator from the start, but the specifics of his crimes -- a weeklong killing/torture spree of his chosen family motivated by messianic delusion -- don't surface until late. The society's response was to elevate him into the ruling elite's inner circle, where he functions as a sophisticated pet: allowed to witness high-level meetings, observe from closets, provide intelligence, but always at their sufferance. He's kept close because he's intelligent and useful, not because he's a visionary.
The majority of this book is a detective story. The investigation into a stolen political document (the Seven-Ten List) uncovers something far darker: the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash has been conducting systematic political assassinations, justified as necessary to maintain world peace. Martin Guildbreaker and Papadelias uncover a state-level assassination conspiracy, apparently running on the exact same messianic logic and hidden as accidental deaths in a highly regulated flying car system.
I personally didn't connect with any of the characters - Mycroft is creepy and gross at best, alternating between sniveling obsequiousness, or creepy obsession (ie repeated mentions of dark Indian skin), with tender parental concern over Bridger.
Then there's Bridger: a 13-year-old alien with god-like reality-warping powers who acts like a 4-year-old and wants to sit on adult laps. He can draw a potion on paper and manifest it. He can resurrect the dead, turn plush toys into living animals. But Palmer gives him no actual imagination or agency. He doesn't explore what else he can do. He doesn't test his powers or question his dependency. He just sits passively, infantilized and underutilized. Don't even get me started on JEDD Mason and Dominic Seneschal.
There are many genetic advancements - people can change their physical gender if they like but they are still in a psot-gender society (despite Mycroft's obsession with using binary gender pronouns). Or consider the centipede cat: multiple segmented bodies, supposedly a marvel of this future world. Except Mycroft describes it wrapping around both your ankles and spiraling onto your lap for petting and snuggles—exactly what a regular four-legged cat already does. The elaborate construction delivers no functional difference, just complication for its own sake. Why not create cats who enjoy improved health with aging - without kidney disease, lymphoma, diabetes or dental issues.
And Palmer never interrogates what it would actually mean to have a multi-segmented creature loose in public -- tripping people, risking injury to itself or bicyclists—assuming anyone even bikes, which they don't seem to, because there's no evidence of embodied physical life in this "utopia." No exercise. No nature engagement, though some of the people like to include elaborate representations of nature on their clothing. Aside from Mycroft torturing someone in the Antarctic, we don't hear much about outdoor activity. Just people in cities and buildings absorbing data and ideas while a totalitarian system monitors their every movement.
The book describes this as a utopia worth saving. Mycroft narrates it as enlightenment nerd. But what's actually on the page: a totalitarian system run by hedonistic elites that keeps a serial killer as a prized pet and a god-like alien child as an infantilized tool. Everyone monitored. Nature abstracted into fashion. The "solutions" (kitchen trees, meat machines) eliminate visible labor without solving underlying constraints. There's no actual life, just the performance of transcendence.
If Palmer intended this as a critique of how totalitarian systems normalize themselves through the eyes of those benefiting from them, it needs to be much clearer. If she actually believes the utopia Mycroft is selling, then the book is inadvertently propaganda for totalitarianism.
Either way, it's overwritten, underpaced, and unwilling to interrogate what it's actually describing. The ambition is real. The execution isn't there.
