Whee! The living

As other reviewers have noted, this novel is different from Ayn Rand's others: it qualifies as literature Actually rather than propaganda.
The characterization is a little off (EC Leo stops being an attractive character in fairly short order), and the alterations from the original version do show. (Rand apparently wanted to make it more "capitalistic" and less "Nietzschean" -. Cf Kira's desire to become to "engineer," Which of nothing whatsoever is made in the novel and see the Earlier versions of some of Kira's speeches, available in _The Journals of Ayn RAND_.) But it's Actually a pretty good novel about the individual human being vs. The Collectivist State.
The rest of the Randian oeuvre is too didactic and too full of cardboard, self-serving moralizing to be classified as "literature"; it's more like the stuff the Soviet propaganda machine used to crank out, only in favor of Rand's version of "capitalism" rather than Soviet communism.
But in this novel we see a hint of what edge Could have become if she'd tried. She wrote this one while her mind what silent Among The Living.