The novel is set in Gardner's "League of Peoples's" futuristic universe, and plays out in the small, isolated village of Tober Cove.

Set on post-apocalyptic Earth, Tober Cove most resembles a rural, seventeenth century fishing village, with one exception: every year, everyone below the age of 21 changes gender.

The fact that the "gods" that descended into the town's harbor every year are stylized planes doesn't bother the residents.

Clad in indestructible armor, with access to the galaxy's latest gadgetry, Spark Lords maintain absolute control over Earth.

At Tor.com, Jo Walton declared that the best thing about the novel was Fullin's voice, which she described as "confident confiding first person"; she also stated that the most interesting thing was Fullin's belief "that he's living in a low tech fantasy world, full of gods and magic and rituals and taboos, when in fact it's quite clear to the reader as the story goes on that this is a post-technological, indeed, post-singularity society", and emphasized that the culture of Tober Cove is "very sophisticated" and "very Canadian".

[1] The SF Site's Donna McMahon considered it to be "engaging, entertaining, funny and very well written", faulting it only in that she found it unlikely that, "in a society with very rigid traditional gender roles, the sex ratio would end up around 50-50 even if each person was given a completely free choice" — and in that she felt Gardner "has never lived in a fishing village" and therefore "didn't capture the feel of a fish-guts-stinking rural subsistence economy".

[2] Conversely, at Quill and Quire, Crawford Kilian compared it negatively to Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, judging Fullin to be "a stock character who speaks in a flat colloquial style that evokes 1990s suburban America", and the society of Tober Cove to be "crude and implausible";[3] Publishers Weekly likewise felt that Gardner "lacks the finesse of Le Guin's anthropological SF", calling it "silly" and "less than stellar".