Right, Pat's powers are a very good point. She is so incredibly powerful, that it's hard for me to imagine how you can spin any serious long story around this, much less a story where she's not even really one of the main characters. It's one of the things that make the book bizarre before the event that we are supposed to think that makes it bizarre (and then the end plays some games with whether that half-life plot twist is really what's happening anyway).

On the spot, I can only come up with a rather stupid analogy, but if stories are carefully mixed and balanced cocktails, then a character that can arbitrarily turn back time for themselves and change things, is like taking that cocktail and pouring in a full bottle of everclear.