Review: I wanted to like this so much...but I didn't
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 09 12, 2012
Warning: This review might contain what some people consider SPOILERS.Rating: 5/10PROS:- Not much time has passed between the end of Spoils of War and the beginning of this book, and the stories flow together quite nicely. The tone and overall feel of this story are similar to those of the first.- This offers a deeper look into not only the background of the first story, but also the characters' motivations and their feelings about the events that occur around them.- The contrast between the men's actual roles (in society) and what they are to each other--Micah a prince but emotionally a slave; Eli a slave but the master within their relationship--makes for some interesting interplay in their struggles for power and dominance over each other.CONS:- Early in the story (for about the first third, I'd guess), there's a lot of mental wandering on Micah's part. This technique does a good job of revealing Micah's character, but I wanted more to be going on externally in the midst of all the pondering and self-reflection. I was, to be blunt, a bit bored.- I struggled far more while reading this installment to understand Micah's finicky nature. I pitied him as I read Spoils of War and was forgiving of most of his psychoses, but here I simply wanted to wring his neck. He's a petulant, vacillatory brat in this book: he wants to remember his past, then he doesn't. He loves Eli but despises him. And so on. And the changes in activity/opinion happen rapidly, with (what I felt were) very spare transitions from one state to the next.- Eli commits some acts in this story that paint him in a less sympathetic light than in the previous book. True, all of these acts are colored by Micah's perception of them--the book is in first person, so we hear about everything through Micah--but my regard for Eli fell rather drastically when his attempts to inspire Micah to greatness are revealed to include duplicity and behind-the-scenes insults.- The ending is abrupt. The make-up scene is all of about two pages.Overall comments: I really enjoyed the first book in this series, and I wanted to really enjoy this second one. I just didn't. Perhaps the story's fractured nature was intentional--the author's way of echoing Micah's fractured state of being, maybe--but I found the constant back-and-forth of Micah's mind (not to mention the characters' repeated prevarication and deception) to be incredibly frustrating. I have a strong feeling that I ought to read the book again, because I feel as though I must have missed something HUGE...but I genuinely didn't like it enough for that prospect to be the least bit appealing, at least right now.