A review by shragoo
Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky

4.25

it was not quite as good as the first book in the series. The

author goes through great pains to describe how different and unknowable and foreign the anatomy and thought processes are of the octopi and the virus, and the result is that it was difficult for me to connect with the octopi and virus. In the first book, by contrast, the spiders are easy to connect with, and become characters that I was rooting for. Also, the book ends the same way as the first, where when all hope seems lost the deemed smart entity (in this book it is the kern meshner hybrid, in the first book it was the portids), figures out a non violent solution to the problem where everyone wins. It was gratifying in both books, but a bit repetitive in the second, whereas in the first it was surprising