The story was different from what I was expecting. When I heard the premise I thought it might go a similar vein to Inkspell or the Thursday Next books. It very quickly became clear that wasn't the case. Which was fine, don't get me wrong. 
 I thought Westerfeld did a really good job differentiating between his voice telling Darcy's story and Darcy's voice telling Lizzie's. However I thought the story about Darcy was much more interesting than Darcy's story (I hope that sentence makes sense). 
 While being able to read Darcy's novel was interesting and it definitely made the conversations the characters had about her book make more sense, I don't know how necessary it was to read all of it, at least in the alternating format. I wonder if it would have been possible to get the same effect with just the occasional chapter from Afterworlds, plus some outlines, editors note, marked up drafts etc. 
 I loved how issues of race and sexuality were explored in the Darcy parts of the book. I liked that there was no "right" answer. Instead it seemed more important to be aware if these issues and put meaningful thought into it than to come up with a final answer forever. I thought it was nice to see a portrayal of a coming out story that isn't so angst ridden. Well there was some angst but it was based on things that were not specific to it being a same sex relationship. 
 Maybe this is just because I liked the Darcy chapters more but I wish there had been an epilogue taking place on publication day, or something to that effect.