(several characters’ genders are only mentioned so fleetingly that I can’t remember what gender they were, and it didn’t really matter for story purposes), but the nature of the story means that a large number of the characters are disabled or Native American, and there’s also a general level of pleasing unemphasised diversity — only two long-term relationships are acknowledged in the novel, one same-sex and one mixed-sex, while the narrator is mixed-race (a fact we discover in an aside on page 330 — his race,

I was being more accurate than I knew when I talked about genders not mattering for story purposes, and less accurate when I referred to the narrator using male pronouns. Someone mentioned in another review, and I checked by doing a word search, that the narrator’s gender is never specified. I’d parsed the name “Chris” as male, but of course it can be used by women and people of other genders too.

I’m now slightly more impressed with the book, and slightly less impressed at my own assumptions.