Sometimes I just want the literary equivalent of junk food. Hullmetal Girls has a cover of an earnest woman in space armor, the dedication is to the kung fu panda 2 soundtrack, and the blurb is about a girl in a lost fleet who agrees to become a robocop for the government, only to find that all is not well (and it’s obvious both what is not going well and where it is going to go). I knew exactly what I was going to get from the book, and by and large, this is an extremely competent version of that.1 I will however say that the actual scene of cyborgization, 2 is genuinely horrific and disturbing, and generated so much good will going forward that I was willing to overlook the otherwise rote plotting and flawed second protagonist arc.
Exactly what you expect it to be.