The first book in this series, Ship Breaker, opens in such a way that only a tiny sliver of the world the book inhabitats is available to the reader. This is mostly because of the narrative perspective employed. It’s very close third person, and we only slowly begin to understand different things about the world. The second book feels like more of the same, except we split the narration among a few characters, still in third, and the world feels quite a bit bigger. This is interesting in the second book, because the actual settings in the second book are less expansive than the first. I feel like there’s something of a promise made in the first book about how big the world is and how big the story is, not epic really, but wide.
This book feels like the weakest of three because of some inconsistency. The narrative is broken wide open, and so is the world, but it also feels incredibly small and cramped throughout. I also think that the perspectives from the “villains” in this book feel like a misstep. I didn’t really care much about them story-wise, and they were my least favorite parts. Over all, I was struggling to keep reading throughout much of this, even when we returned to some familiar things from previous books. It’s not that the first bookw as lightning in a bottle or anything like that, it’s more that that book brought us to a certain level, and then we statyed there for the rest of the book series.
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