A few pages into this book, I wasn't sure if I was going to finish it. The descriptions of events were so abstract that I felt I had a poor grasp of the story and its characters. But I stuck with it, and the book really came into its own in the second act.

In particular, the entire section where one of the characters approaches a psychiatrist because he has killed someone is very compelling. We don't know who he has killed or why, and we have just enough familiarity with the characters to care to find out. And the conclusions drawn are an excellent piece of character development in the third act.

But I was ultimately disappointed by the end, which felt abrupt and tacked on, as though Sturgeon felt it was necessary to find a traditional SF theme to end with. I would rather have seen more exploration of the central concept - questions as to whether the whole is really greater than the sum of its parts. In the end, this book wasn't.