Adam

This series finally gets good.

There's honestly not much to say. Gone are the books that seem like a kitchen sink's worth of backstories, locations, and characters or items that are a one-and-done. Plots and quests actually have purpose, and there is energy behind what happens. Events here are much more likely to have relevance than the ones in previous books.

Yeah. It's short and sweet, in terms of a review. Solid. Nothing extraordinary, but good work. Brandon Mull has somewhat redeemed his atrocious treatment of Seth in Book 1 by giving him an actual character moment at the end of this book. I have slight frustration at how little his amnesia was actually a plot point until now, but at least he has to face a hard decision.

This is precisely my kind of fiction. There's no consistent characters, which makes me more interested in each one as they come up, and more fascinated by their respective scenes and ideas. Not everything makes sense, but this is the kind of book where I'm rather ok with that. This is supposed to be cautionary and unsettling, and it does a good job of being all of that. I'm not sure if this is old enough to be considered a classic, but if it is, it has become one of my favorite works of classic literature.

It is what it says on the box.

This was a highly enjoyable and memorable read that can best be summed up as a “curiosity”. It's very enjoyable to explore the concepts of 2D living, and have that become an exploration of thought on the fourth dimension, but I think the story fails to combine them in a satisfactory manner. Splitting the book into 2 parts makes sense, but the first half is much less interesting (to me at least) than the second. Cohesion is the word which aptly describes what it lacks.

Also, it's very classist and sexist, and I am here for it.