I never thought I'd be in a position to give a 1-star review to a book I actually bothered to finish, but here we are. 
 Starting with the good: ...the writing was occasionally pretty. 
 That's it. And, frankly, the prettiness was severely inhibited by the attempt to be profound with the actual content. 
 Now for the bad: ...oh boy, where do I even begin? 
 Do I start with the premise? The sudden devolution of humanity into hairless white androgynes obsessed with their own self-mutilation? This sexless society is sex-obsessed, with ever-present implications of their loss of secondary characteristics and carnal desires is directly linked to an overall loss of humanity. 
 Maybe I should just address some of the themes. The inverse-Gnosticism that claims all is only matter, and therefore life is no more or less than dirt. That 'spirit' is a myth. That the extinction of humanity in its arrogance is for the good of 'matter'/the universe. (view spoiler)[The self-sacrificial suicide of Joan--who is repeatedly implied to be more 'matter' than human, and therefore somehow more or less than a person--at the end of the book (and with it, the genocide of the surviving humans), so that by her return to the earth it may be born anew. (hide spoiler)] 
 How 'bout that the twist near the ending, in which our primary male antagonist--who has spent the book manually and surgically raping the women around him in an attempt to control and/or induce fertility--is revealed to be (view spoiler)[designated female at birth? (hide spoiler)] 
 Some people are hailing this as a powerful feminist work--I'm sorry, but there's a scene where a woman's vestigial ovaries are ripped out through her vagina. More than one scene like that. And our hero, for all that she is defined as True Woman, inexplicably untouched by the changes ravaging the rest of the human race, is regularly reduced to 'more matter than human.' (view spoiler)[Pretty sure I also mentioned that she ends up committing suicide at the end of the book to bring about the next cycle of life? (hide spoiler)] 
 Other people are reading this as an environmentalist work. Yeah, okay. So Joan is kind of an Avatar of earth/matter, but rather than any kind of reconciliation, the book frames the answer to environmental problems in terms of genocide. And for all that it's supposed this might not be the answer early on, we seem to end up in pretty much the same place at the end--but it's okay! Because we're not actually killing people! We're just transitioning them to the next stage of matter! (Can you hear my sarcasm?) 
 There's just... so much that rubs me the wrong way. It was like reading a train wreck--so horrible I couldn't look away. So utterly repulsive I had a hard time wrapping my head around it. 
 It's taken me three tries to write this out. I cannot emphasize enough how much I dislike this book. I do not recommend it to anyone.