I'll be honest. I picked up this book in my examination of Hugo nominees expecting to read a few pages and then give up on it. It was a book 3, and it had been nominated as part of a slate of other stories I didn't like, and I don't much like the author as an internet personality. 
 And I almost did give up. The Prologue is nearly pointless and read weirdly. But the setting interested me. I read a little more. And then a little more. By the time I reached about page 60, I decided I'd at least read 100 pages. And by the time I read 100 pages I knew I was going to finish it. 
 There's a lot I don't like about it: some of the politics, the loving descriptions of mass murder, the extremely stereotypical scene where the Japanese woman seduces the hero because it was That Time in the pre-climactic checklist. 
 There's other stuff I'm ambivalent about: the most powerful person in the book is a young woman, and she's written with a clear and distinctive voice and yet as a person she was really boring. I mean, not that many of the characters were better. 
 However. This is not a character book. This is a setting book. 
 It's a world where an interdimensional alien fleeing a predator bonds with humanity in a symbiotic way, giving individual humans superpowers in exchange for nourishment when those humans die. It's a world where this happened relatively recently, and our own world's history is still struggling to reconcile with that. And I simply loved reading about the setting, and how the various bits of the setting interacted, and how cleverly the superpowers were described and used. It's a pretty brilliant book in that regard. 
 I've heard people dismiss the book out of hand as a Hugo nominee just because the other two books weren't nominated and the author _campaigned_. 60 pages in I wasn't sure that was a valid observation. The books that get nominated tend to be a certain _kind_ of book, or from a certain kind of author, in my limited observations. I think it's perfectly possible that this book is just the wrong kind of book from the wrong kind of author, because it was _excellent_ science fantasy with wonderful worldbuilding and an interesting exploration of genre concepts. I think it's a perfectly valid nominee. 
 If it wasn't for the very brief scene where the Japanese lady offers herself to the brave hero, I might even have given it four stars. It's an extremely cinematic scene in an extremely cinematic book but I would have docked any movie for the same scene, so.