Pandora's Star

A massive and epic book.

Pros:
• A Prologue that is just a brilliant tale with a great twist all by itself.
• A fascinating setting which, to be honest, was what drew me in the most.
• Some interesting characters - the absolute stand-out character was the Detective Paula Myo. Why oh why won't Mr Hamilton just write a series of “The Paula Myo Investigations”?
• Great action scenes - as always with me action can be utterly boring or riveting - what makes the difference is whether or not you actually care about the characters. Mr Hamilton handled this very well making the more exciting bits into absolute page turners.

Cons:
• The book could very easily be a quarter of the size, there are many verbose passages that really, really could be replaced with a well formed sentence.
• The “Ozzie and the very long walk” story starts out fascinating, but Oh my goodness does it drag after a while. The fact that it appears to be disconnected to the other narratives (I know ultimately it joins up) means that it takes a supreme effort of will not to just skip the whole thing to get back to the main narrative. Just for the record I think Ozzie is great and the story is fascinating - but it so gets in the way of everything else.
• As with other Hamilton books, his treatment of many female characters does not sit well with me, occasionally making me question whether I should be reading this. Hence the fact that I really felt I couldn't give this the 5 stars it otherwise would deserve.