Pandora's Star

I have very mixed feelings about this book, and of the experience of having read it. As a result, I'm not sure I can say that I truly ‘enjoyed' it; it's well-crafted, overall, but at the same time not without its frustrations.

First, the good stuff: there's a hugely epic plot here, ultimately concerned with ensuring the continued survival of the human race; bold, three-dimensional characters who are intriguing, and draw you into their story; plot twists that you truly never see coming, and which are revealed with a subtle mastery that forces you to rethink everything you've read up until that point;and a fascinating, amazingly-thought out world that all of this is set in.

On the other hand, however, the book has its problems, chief of which is its length and pacing. This is a book that is almost one thousand pages long, which by itself I don't have a problem with. Some of my favourite novels and novel series feature lengths like that. While the length isn't a problem, the way the plot develops within that length was a problem for me - I remember at one point thinking to myself “oh, the action is starting to pick up and the plot's finally moving forward”, and then looking at the page number and seeing something in the three hundreds. Then, after another four hundred pages of exciting outer space action, things slow down again for another couple of hundred pages, once again getting exciting for the last hundred pages before finally ending on a cliffhanger. Add to this chapters that were routinely over fifty pages long, and which didn't seem to have any strong internal structure to them, and you're left with a book that I strongly considered giving up on several times during the process of reading it. And yet, at the end, I was left with a strong desire to check out the sequel, which is another thousand page book and will no doubt have many of the same issues.