Bear, Elizabeth - Scardown

[oyceter]

I liked Hammered, mostly due to the strong female characters and the AI. I think Scardown doesn't quite live up to it, or else I just really wasn't expecting the type of book it turned out to be. As stated before, Hammered drew me in because it was very much about personal struggles, despite the larger scope of the things, and the bits I liked best were Jenny's conflicts with herself and with her own life, the backstory between her and her sisters, and the sense of a past. The problem I had with Scardown was that the plot for the world sort of takes over the plots for the characters, so much so that I don't really come out thinking that any of them have an arc.

I don't quite know what it was -- there were so many POVs that I was never quite sure who to focus on, and even though Jenny was the protagonist of Hammered and I assume the protagonist of Scardown, due to her lone first persson POV, I never quite emotionally connected with her. Ditto with my favorite characters from the previous book, Richard and Elspeth.

I did rather like how Bear kept the romantic triangle an actual romantic triangle, although I did get the occasional squidge at times. I think mostly that was because of my deep and rabid dislike of romantic triangles, as opposed to how it was actually carried out. Mostly, I'm just very nidgy around situations where women get possessive over a guy and start being jealous about other women.

Anyhow, I'm not sure if I will end up picking up the third book in the trilogy, largely because I'm personally not all that interested in the issues that have been raised in this book.