3.5 stars, Metaphorosis reviews
Summary
Having finally left the planet Cersi, where Om'ray had been trapped for centures, and M'hiray had only recently come, what's left of the Clan tries to understand and communicate with the highly advanced spaceship they inhabit, and figure out where it's taking them.
Review
This book was always going to have a tough time, because so much was resolved in the first book that it left few options for the story. In the event, I found the bulk of this middle entry to be workmanlike, but not terribly interesting. The end, however does pull out some somewhat unexpected elements, including one very nicely managed twist about the Watchers. However, it feels like it has left the third book even more constrained. As some books have multiple openings, this series has had two endings already, and I worry now about the third.
About half the book is spent in a Hoveny spaceship with technology far beyond what any of the participating cultures has, and I felt Czerneda could have done far more with the “Look! Cool stuff!” aspect. She instead concentrates on the group’s emotions and psychology. Ordinarily, this could be fertile ground, but it frankly felt muddled and never committed to. One healing stratagem using the ship is foiled at the end, but I didn’t really care much, and it never felt like any of the characters expected it to work either.
There’s a little more interest when the ship gets where it’s going, but I was disappointed that it was generally ‘more of the same’ – something like I felt in John C. Wright’s Golden Oecumene trilogy, when the protagonist gets to the bottom of a long and mysterious sky ladder, to an unexplored world that is … just like the one he left, just on the ground. Again, I felt Czerneda could have done much more with the society the ship finds, but that she rushed through it all to get to other things.
The other things, Watchers included, are interesting, but it didn’t feel to me as if they had much grounding in the 7 books that had gone before. Czerneda does tie this in to some events previously described, but it felt like a marriage of convenience rather than organic growth.
Overall, a functional but disappointing middle book with an odd ending.