The Bobiverse moves on, Bob has pretty much gone native living as an Deltan (in android form) in his adopted community, Riker is still trying to get the rest of humanity off Earth before it’s too late, Howard’s still falling in love, Marcus is getting involved in revolution and all of them are wondering when the Others’ boot is going to fall.
And that quick summary also highlights one of the problems with this book (actually this trilogy really but it only became acute in the second book) and that is the sheer number of threads Taylor has running and I think the biggest weakness of the book is that many of these threads have very little to do with one another. In my review of the previous book I expressed my concern that they might eventually turn out to be multiple linked but unrelated stories and this is has largely turned out to be the case and, sadly, whilst there is a generally excellent conclusion to the main story I found the others seemed to peter out with very little in the way of concrete conclusions provided. The journey was once again fun and Taylor handled the hopping between threads pretty well for the most part, though I still found many of the chapters/sections way too short leaving me at times somewhat dizzy from the speed of thread swapping. But ultimately I found the lack of convergence of those multiple threads somewhat unsatisfying.
Still, Taylor’s writing is as fluid as ever making the reading easy and enjoyable (apart from all that swapping), the individual Bob characters and are all well developed with their individual quirks making each stand out from the others, so avoiding too much identity confusion, and the pacing is excellent with never a dull moment. All in all a good read but, for me, though fun just a little unsatisfying.
3/5 stars
And that quick summary also highlights one of the problems with this book (actually this trilogy really but it only became acute in the second book) and that is the sheer number of threads Taylor has running and I think the biggest weakness of the book is that many of these threads have very little to do with one another. In my review of the previous book I expressed my concern that they might eventually turn out to be multiple linked but unrelated stories and this is has largely turned out to be the case and, sadly, whilst there is a generally excellent conclusion to the main story I found the others seemed to peter out with very little in the way of concrete conclusions provided. The journey was once again fun and Taylor handled the hopping between threads pretty well for the most part, though I still found many of the chapters/sections way too short leaving me at times somewhat dizzy from the speed of thread swapping. But ultimately I found the lack of convergence of those multiple threads somewhat unsatisfying.
Still, Taylor’s writing is as fluid as ever making the reading easy and enjoyable (apart from all that swapping), the individual Bob characters and are all well developed with their individual quirks making each stand out from the others, so avoiding too much identity confusion, and the pacing is excellent with never a dull moment. All in all a good read but, for me, though fun just a little unsatisfying.
3/5 stars
