Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (being the latest novel by Cory Doctorow) was slow to grab my attention and then didn't hold on to it as well as I would have liked. I really liked Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, but the direction he's moved toward since just hasn't intrigued me as much. Down and Out was about normal people being normal people in a weirder world (one in which average people could take control of and shape Disney World rides). Eastern Standard Tribe (and now Someone) reversed that and was about weirder people trying to be normal people in the normal world. EST offered something akin to a spy novel thriller, and that made it entertaining when it wasn't spending so much work trying to give a glimpse into the "normal world". In Someone I found the normal world sequences even more tedious. The weirder sequences offered some small bits of fun and interesting visual images, but in their way seemed much more like a drawn out punch line than an actual attempt at something interesting.
I figure I should clarify, though, that the "normal" sequences of EST and Someone are actually more "pop geek" (like the stuff they put on TechTV (before G4) that people drooled over and became "popular"; we could install lee-nix and set up wireless networking and be cool!), thus I guess I might identify with them as being closer to "normal" a bit more than the next guy.
I particularly felt that the denoument for Someone left several things to be desired. Much of the book seems to hint that it might be leading somewhere; that there might actually be some sort of idea of where things are going; that there might be some big revelation towards the back of the book. I was disappointed. The book just sort of ends, with no real questions answered or anything really major accomplished. Overall the book was "cute" and "interesting", but not very deep.