What's most striking about this book is how beautifully written it is, and how the author's prose creates such an effective melancholy atmosphere. This novel is set in the distant future, in Chinese controlled Scandinavia, where global warming caused flooding and protracted resource wars and oil and potable water shortages have left what's left of the world poor and beholden to restrictive military rule. The protagonist Noria is a young tea master who over the course of the book deals with learning her father's trade and then learning to cope with his death, guarding a secret water source, surreptitiously assisting a close friend and her family who are in perpetually dire straits as military surveillance steadily increases and the discovery of a puzzling and troubling mystery from a "twilight century" of disappeared history. 
 Dystopian novels have been very trendy for the last several years, meaning the market is been glutted with a lot of interchangeable books that feel like they've been rolled off an assembly line. I appreciated how much this book avoided the tropes of the genre and actually felt distinctive. 
 This is an intimate story. The cast of characters is small, there's not a lot of exposition, and plot is low on action, relying instead on the slow escalation of tension. I found it a nice change of pace to read a book like this where the protagonist isn't a shiny, special chosen one, and her problems, while serious, are grounded in her personal circumstances rather than a large scale "OMG the world is ending and only I can stop it" impending apocalypse or rebellion. The small scale nature of this story did mean that in a few instances the world building wasn't as thorough as I would have liked, but there was plenty that was intriguing to me about this world even if it was somewhat underdeveloped. 
 Also, the author didn't feel obligated to shoe horn in a romance and/or love triangle. This restraint is highly appreciated.