River of Blue Fire

Executive Summary: Slow start, and many slow places throughout. The good parts make up for a lot of it, but for that reason I'm rounding my 3.5 stars down.

Audio book: Another great job by George Newbern. He definitely

Full Review
I really enjoyed the first book. Not so much for the characters, but for the setting and the cool ideas. I've always loved the idea of virtual worlds, and Mr. Williams made an excellent blend of Fantasy and Sci-Fi that seemed to hit my buttons in the right way.

Unfortunately, the the cool ideas of the first one weren't enough to overcome some slowness, and the characters were more important to my enjoyment of the book. I found some of them annoying, or uninteresting, and it made their plotlines a bit slower.

Renie who I enjoyed in the first book, got on my nerves at times. Thankfully !Xabbu was there to help that story along. The most interesting plotline for me was probably Orlando, though Paul's story was pretty good as too. The rest of them I found good at times, and very slow at times. It felt like there were far too many POVs this go around. I guess with a 4 book door stopper series like this, that's to be expected, but I feel some of it could have been tightened up.

Much of this book seemed to be a way for Mr. Williams to live out fantasy of worlds he'd like to visit/explore from history and/or fiction. I suspect if he chose more worlds that I found fascinating, I'd have enjoyed those parts much more. I found the time spent in bug land particularly tedious.

Yet somehow despite all this, I still enjoyed the book. The ideas and the overarching story have its hooks into me. I want to know what happens next. I will definitely be picking up the third book once my audio time frees up a little. I'm just hoping the pace of the story picks up in the next book.