The book follows several characters around as they try to live in this world. They are related but the storylines do not really intersect to come to a climax, it is more like we just see several people's stories that flesh out the world. The story focuses generally on people trying to continue to live with their American ideals even a world where those are belittled and unvalued.
The racism in this book is so intense that it actually bothered me to read. The way that the culture treated basically every non-Aryan, non-Japanese person caused me a moderate amount of stress while reading. The fact that people could be that horrible to one another, and these people weren't even the villians of the story, just casual people off the street, is amazing and not in a positive way. History was rough, but this clearly shows it could have been rougher.
Almost every character in this book consults the I Ching which I am not exceedingly familiar with but my understanding is that it is a fortune telling device like tarot cards. The way that the people tend to read whatever they want into it seems like a minor critique of fortune tellers while at the same time showing how much America has changed from the one of the real world 60's.
I think the part that will stick with me the longest is a quote towards the end of this book: “We do not have the ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious.” The quote has an interesting sentiment and I like the concept that doing good is hard but it is worth doing anyway.
Overall, I would give this book a 92%.
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