Jilly's Reviews > Children of Ruin

Not as good as the first book.
(How many times has that sentence been written here?)

So, our spider race and Humans from the last book are now out exploring space like the Star Trek gang and they come across a race of octopuses/octopi... whatever.. There is also some other, very dangerous, alien around and basically it's mayhem from the start of this meeting. The octos communicate very differently than the spiders or humans, and the dangerous aliens are looking to kill everything because it's an "adventure." So, yeah, misunderstandings and strange, unknown motivations on all sides.


Yes, just like this. Why did that seal hit the human in the face with an octopus? Is this a compliment or insult? Is the octopus a willing participant in this assault, or just the first thing the seal could get its flippers on? So many questions...

This was a lot like the first book, which I refer to as the space-spiders book, except with the evolution of the octopus race. The problem was that the octopus race is very unorganized and doesn't have this great development story like the spiders did. There is a lot of wheel spinning going on and not much forward movement. So, that was a bit disappointing. Pretty much every chapter told us how the octopuses think differently than humans (or spiders), and we pretty much didn't need to be reminded of that over and over again. We get it. I just felt like a lot of time was wasted because of it.

But, even that wasn't the most annoying thing in the book. Oh no. It was the adventure-aliens. O.M.G. It's a complete race of aliens that will annoy the fuck out of the most patient person on Earth. I swear that Ghandi would have wanted to kill the little bastards.

No, seriously, I'm not being a smartass jerk for once. Just look at this quote from the POV of these pathetic losers:

Those-of-We (which became These-of-We) carried the archives of All-of-We, and so as long as some survived, We survived. We remember.
That might not seem too bad, but imagine the "We" thing repeated about 500 million times throughout the book. (We-of-Us, We-of-Them, We-of-Past, We-of-Present, Some-of-We, All-of-We, These-of-We, Such-of-We) Gets a wee bit annoying, yes?



So, no, it wasn't as good, but it was still okay if you liked the first one because we get to see what happened after it ended. I liked some of the main characters and I would have been more interested in seeing their lives a bit more back at spider-planet rather than this one. But, I give props to the author for writing things like super-smart spiders and octopuses. Inventive stuff!