YouKneeK

This is the second book in the trilogy that started with Nexus.  I won’t talk about the plot, because doing so would spoil the story from the first book.  I’ll just say that the story picks up about three months after the end of the first book and progresses more or less along the lines you might expect.

I think I enjoyed this as much as, if not slightly more than, the first book.  It felt more consistently fast-paced.  One thing that helped is that, while there’s still quite a bit of moral ambiguity, the characters don’t debate it as much.  The format was also somewhat different with shorter chapters, a larger cast of point-of-view characters, and rapid changes between characters.  I know some people don’t like books that have a lot of characters, but for me it depends on how distinctive those characters are and how interesting their stories are.  In the case of this book, each character’s story was interesting to me.  The characters were also distinctive enough that I never mixed them up, although I can’t say the same for the author.

I was surprised to see several editing issues, because I don’t remember any glaring errors in the first book.  There were large sections that seemed perfectly fine, but then I’d start noticing several errors.  Poor Claire, a minor character, had a particularly rough time.  Not only did her name get misspelled, but she had to stand in for another guy’s wife at one point.  They were in bed at the time, so I’m sure that was awkward.  (No, it definitely wasn’t intended to be that way in the story.)  I enjoyed the story too much to be terribly annoyed about the errors, but they were a little distracting so I hope there are fewer in the third book.

I find myself really on the fence in regard to what I think about where things are going in the story, even in terms of potential consequences that the good guys seem to consider a good thing.  The bad things are really, really bad, but the “good things” are a bit horrifying to me also, or maybe it’s just that they’re portrayed idealistically and I think the reality would be very different.  I’m going to reserve judgment until I finish the trilogy and then I might discuss it more within spoiler tags, depending on what I think by the time I make it to the end.  Either way, I’m pretty absorbed by the story and I look forward to seeing how the author concludes it.