SOJALS rating:

Good (3/5)

I first read this on the 7th January 2005.

In which Washen, Panir and other characters, old and new, continue in their epic voyaging across the Universe aboard their great ship.

I raved about "Marrow" and Robert Reed's other books. I don't (currently) feel so strongly about this book. Unlike "Marrow", this sequel hasn't left the same astounding images bouncing around my head. After all when your original plot includes a space ship the size of Jupiter with an entire planet hidden deep within its depths, you know you're going to struggle to come up with something bigger.

However, it still gets you in many places. Look at Washen returning to the house where she lived thousands of years previously. Darn near inspired me to take a trip back to the ancestral home in Callow Street, from which Max himself sprung so many years ago, to remember myself kneeling on the pavement outside playing marbles; hiding in dustbins, or being dressed up as Guy Fawkes and pushed around in a pram by Bigger Max, providing the seed capital for the international business empire Bigger Max was eventually to build. Ah, but the glamour of those days is lost in the shadowed past. Although I'd admit that I did make the trip, and took photos - sadly of the house next door (an understandable mistake, given the complexities of the digital camera, and anyway correct photos were taken by La Junkoette whose feminine wiles quickly mastered the camera).

It is a good book however, and essential reading if you have already devoured "Marrow".