A distant planet is celebrating the Fourth of July holiday: it has two native sentient species, one almost exterminated and totally alien, the Demons, the other almost humanoid and many accepting humanity to the point of major plastic surgery, adoption of Roman Catholicism and learning the music of Beethoven. Some of these humanoids, though, are rebelling.
A very English consul is at a party when he and Katherine (a native made beautifully human) are kidnapped in a rebel raid. Without her medicines she begins to fall apart and to doubt the value of mimicking human shape. In moments of despair she tears out her plastic fingernails and tearducts, and starts to cut her body with shears.
As the consul and Katherine escape and journey back to their friends they discover how alien the aliens are, and even more isolate is the last demon. The optimism of the last few pages is out of keeping with the rest of the last half of the book.
This is a not a planet that I have visited before but it is a familiar world because it is based on this one, and other writers have made gestures towards it (Walter Tevis in The Man Who Fell To Earth, for instance). This is how empires end: with minor British consuls in dry, distant parts taking drinks with the last friendly, anglicised natives, while the rebels in the hills have taken that bastard form too (and now try to cast it off).
Without her drugs Katherine struggles painfully with the body the surgeons have given her. However, that is not something that is in the future: it is happening now. Harriet Oimu, the rebel leader who is allowing her human face to fall apart, could be compared to the schizophrenics who refuse to take medication on political grounds, while the extent medication is necessary in Katherine's bodyshaping surgery is also a necessity today. Radio Four has broadcast a discussion of potential face transplants for the badly burned: the problem is not with the surgery, it is with the amount of immunosuppressant drugs the patient must take: levels which make kidney failure and cancer almost certainties. Paul Park thinks things are not going to change much.
An alternate reading is that he has not written speculative fiction, he has written an allegory of today. The effect, though, is not to make problems clearer or more easily identifiable, but to distance them and make them slightly more blurred. Particularly, I could not see the significance of having an American planet so interested in English life. Is Paul Park, who lives in New York, aware of the implications of the alien in this sentence in chapter three:- "There were very few Christians left in Golders Green, in London"? If he is there must be much deeper levels than I have realised in the book.