The second installment of Hal Duncan's Book of All Hours was unfortunately a letdown. The first and much of the second had so much promise, I really wanted to like it, and I did enjoy most of the books, but it really never delivered a full story. The characters, scenes, themes, were all intriguing, but they never really came together into a coherent whole. What really did each section of the two books (four in all) have to do with each other? There is no cohesive storyline, just a lot of interesting imagery and snippets of lives that never seem to come to an understandable whole.
I did really love a number of the characters, however, I felt that some lacked depth because of the way that we were constantly moving from one version of a character to another through the different folds (worlds) of the Vellum. We get to know surface info on a dozen different Phree/Anna/Inannas, but never really get to know any of them. Another intriguing portion of the book is when it's revealed that the seven central characters are supposedly different aspects of one soul. For me, this did not work. And, I do wonder why only one portion of this soul was portrayed by a woman and why the woman's role in the soul was a stereotypically male role, the fighter.
Duncan is a really interesting writer and a lot of the text really lives, but I had a difficult time understanding the final point of the story, if there was one. I would have liked more information on the portion of the novel where the angels are attempting to create God, this seemed really interesting but I needed more to get it.
Still, it was worth the read for the style and ideas. Reminiscent of some cyberpunk I've read. Perhaps if I return for a second read I'll understand it more as I did with Gibson's Neuromancer.
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