It's the not-too-distant future. A corporation with the innocuous name of "HydraCorp" is in charge of India, everyone is microchipped, and terrorists are still killing people. 
 It does sound interesting. Too bad "The Girl in the Road: A Novel" rarely takes advantage of all the cool promise that it contains -- it feels like Monica Byrne had a cluster of interesting ideas, so she wrote a sci-fi novel until she ran out of those ideas. It's written in such a bland, almost bored style, never really evoking any emotions of fear, pain, desire or excitement... just a story that stretches on and on, patting itself on the back as it goes. 
 After waking up with snakebites, Meena is convinced that the people who killed her parents are now after her, so she flees to Mumbai. Since this is in the not-too-distant corporate dystopia, there is only one way of dodging tracking-chip surveillance -- the Trail. It's a floating corporate.... thing that spans the Arabian Ocean, and only the most devil-may-care are willing to swim out and illegally walk upon it. Or in Meena's case, the most desperate. 
 Well, not that desperate -- Meena has sex with a man, has sex with a woman, hangs around a pool, takes a tour, and keeps bumping into a girl who doesn't wear shoes. Eventually she gets around to buying supplies and setting out on her journey. We also follow Mariama, a young girl who also ends up on a journey to Ethiopia, protected by an enigmatic woman on the journey. 
 As I read through "The Girl in the Road," I was haunted by a single repeating remark: "I'm so brilliant, I'm so deep. I'm so brilliant, I'm so deep. I'm so brilliant, I'm so deep. I'M SO BRILLIANT, I'M SO DEEP! Take my book seriously! It deals with super-serious issues!" 
 And while I try to not presume that I know what an author is thinking when they write a book, "The Girl in the Road" feels uncomfortably like the first novel of a talented but pretentious young college student. You know, someone who has newly stepped into the campus world, and now thinks she is super-knowledgeable about LGBT people, environmental issues, gender relations, world affairs, and the future status of countries that she has never been to. Someone young, pretentious and trying desperately to show their wisdom and brilliance, and YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND THE ISSUES, MOM! 
 And to Monica Byrne's credit, she does address all those issues. The thing is, she doesn't do it very well. I mean, the subtlety of a big evil monolithic corporation called "HydraCorp"? Lesbian pedophilia? A half-sketched-out future India that feels like Byrne read Ian McDonald and didn't realize why his works are GOOD? 
 And even if you can sidestep the BIG IMPORTANT MESSAGES of the book, it's... just not a good book. Monica Byrne does have writing talent, winding her story with moments of poetic beauty ("A garland of golden streetlights, the Queen's Necklace, rings the bay"). But she also crams it with countless minutiae that just drag the thin plot down and kill whatever tension is there. Do I really care what Meena has on her futuristic kindle? There is a paragraph solely devoted to listing all the authors. 
 It becomes clear as the book winds on that Meena is also mentally ill, which you would think would bring some passion and vivid emotion to the story. It doesn't. Instead, it just allows for rambling stream-of-consciousness descriptions of what Meena is doing. In fact, nothing seems to stir up any emotion in this flat novel -- there are multiple instances of characters performing anesthetic-free surgery on THEMSELVES... and all we get is mild manageable pain and a vague sense of boredom. 
 So if the contents of the futuristic kindle are more worthy of attention than Meena gouging a microchip from her armpit.... why am I supposed to be invested? 
 Written by a more experienced author, "The Girl in the Road" would have been a fascinating book. But sadly, instead it's a big bland mess that tries to substitute hallucinations and sex for vitality. Read some Ian McDonald instead.