Waking Gods

Book Title: A Mind Full of Murder

Author: Sylvain Neuvel

Series: Themis Files #2

Date Started: April 6th  2024

Date Completed: May 5th 2024

Genres: Science Fiction, Mystery

Quality Rating: Three Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Three Star

Final Rating: Three Stars

Review:

I remember really enjoying the first novel in this series when I got it for review a few years ago. It was science fiction but with a strong current of mystery, archaeology and human-centric drama and philosophy. Waking Gods wasn't quite the same experience with me, but I expect this is because it suffers from middle-book-in-a-trilogy syndrome. That and it features the most unconvincing ten-year-old ever.

The transcript style of prose gets old pretty quickly and loses its novelty - it worked pretty well in the first book but I think it loses the story's momentum once the mystery element has gone. The problem with just dialogue is also that you lose a lot of the subtext, and writers are tempted to be far too direct with their characters' intentions. And once you have more than two characters in a scene it becomes hard to follow - not the best for a character-based novel!

The story in general felt like filler; lots of weird mysterious events are introduced but with no real progress on uncovering them. I guess it'll be revealed in the final book of the trilogy, but it's always a frustrating experience to have to read a whole book with no satisfying resolutions and just more questions. I hope the final book balances the action and talking across both the plot and the relationships a bit more, so we get satisfying answers to the alien mysteries and vaguely convincing closure to the characters' arcs.