Do you know those books that drop you in at the deepend, something major is happening right away but you don't know what's going on and the words are a meaningless jumble until you gradually start to make sense of what's happening? Well, this book's like that at the start of every single chapter.Even though this book is a single narrative thread, the plot lurches forward with each chapter, often in some seemingly bizarre cliffhanger situation that you have no idea how it came about. The narrative then backtracks filling in the blanks and relieving the reader's confusion. Pretty soon the novelty of this approach began to wane and it became a little tiresome.
The story was okay. The protagonist, a perpetual student who runs about on rooftops for fun, unwittingly gets embroiled in a interstella conspiracy that threatens earth's place a new galactic order. Everyone thinks he is in possession of a precious alien artifact but he doesn't know anything about it...or does he?
My favourite bit was when he went in went through an inversion machine that switches his body from left to right, down to a molecular level. His perception was inverted and even food and drink tasted different because of flavours being affected by the asymmetry of their molecular makeup.
But overall nothing particularly special and one I will likely quickly forget.