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A review by booksong
Crashed by Robin Wasserman
3.0
This was a good sequel...but it wasn't anything to get too excited about, unfortunately. The plot and characters of this book seem to hitting snags in their development; I couldn't help feeling as I read that I'd seen too much of this stuff before.
For one thing, Lia's intense mental and moral angsting gets old. I like when characters muse over ideas and problems and think things through, but the constant and often repetitive buzz of Lia's angry, sad, tortured, thoughtful inner monologue started to wear on me after a couple hundred pages. The ideas behind her thinking are fascinating - "What constitutes humanity? Feeling? Memory? What is it to be alive?" - but she already hashed these questions out in the first book. It gets ad-nauseum here.
There is more action here, and some development in terms of who's good, who's bad, and who's going to be dangerous to our main characters. Many people are still very ambiguous, but not because they're being mysteriously developed, just because they seem to flip-flop between being kind of cool and being annoying. I still can't stand Jude, and not even in a respectful villainous way. Just that he's a monumental jerk, and I can't understand any of the various characters' sympathy, trust, or loyalty to him.
The one other area I had a problem with here was Lia's relationship with Riley. I get that she needs to spread out a little and explore exactly what constitutes love and desire in a mech body, but Riley was so...boring. And so was Lia's interaction with him. There was just no spark. Compared to her vital, touching relationship with Auden that developed in the first book, I felt let down, especially because Auden himself stays "offscreen" for most of this one.
The climax scene and last couple chapters were very good though (mostly because Auden reappeared and Lia interacted with him), and made me interested enough to probably read the 3rd and final book.
For one thing, Lia's intense mental and moral angsting gets old. I like when characters muse over ideas and problems and think things through, but the constant and often repetitive buzz of Lia's angry, sad, tortured, thoughtful inner monologue started to wear on me after a couple hundred pages. The ideas behind her thinking are fascinating - "What constitutes humanity? Feeling? Memory? What is it to be alive?" - but she already hashed these questions out in the first book. It gets ad-nauseum here.
There is more action here, and some development in terms of who's good, who's bad, and who's going to be dangerous to our main characters. Many people are still very ambiguous, but not because they're being mysteriously developed, just because they seem to flip-flop between being kind of cool and being annoying. I still can't stand Jude, and not even in a respectful villainous way. Just that he's a monumental jerk, and I can't understand any of the various characters' sympathy, trust, or loyalty to him.
The one other area I had a problem with here was Lia's relationship with Riley. I get that she needs to spread out a little and explore exactly what constitutes love and desire in a mech body, but Riley was so...boring. And so was Lia's interaction with him. There was just no spark. Compared to her vital, touching relationship with Auden that developed in the first book, I felt let down, especially because Auden himself stays "offscreen" for most of this one.
The climax scene and last couple chapters were very good though (mostly because Auden reappeared and Lia interacted with him), and made me interested enough to probably read the 3rd and final book.