Previous book here. Again, the entire review is going to have to go beneath the spoiler cut. I'm giving it four stars--still good, but the ending, well....
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A year after Travis returned to Tangent and Paige, re-President Garner is shot in the Oval Office with a missile. The culprit left a note for Tangent with the words, "See Scalar." What's that? Nobody in Tangent actually knows--the records were deleted and the folks who were in on it, like Paige's dad, are dead or retired. Well, there's one lone Tangent retiree still alive and living under a fake name, if they can just find out where she went. But that's something only Paige's dad knew. How do you find out that stuff without a record?
Well...there's an app entity for that. "The Tap" drills into a person's brain temporarily and lets them relieve/rewrite an old memory--once. Paige uses it to find out where the retiree, Carrie, lives now. Of course, the bad guys know too, so it takes some doing. They eventually find out from Carrie that "Scalar" was a code word for finding out what happened to Ruben Ward, the poor bastard that switched on the machine that caused the Breach. As far as we knew from book one, he ended up in a coma. However, he came out of it, dictated a lot of instructions given to him by the aliens to his wife, ran away from the hospital, destroyed the notes, and eventually killed himself. Travis uses The Tap to try to get himself--he was 10 years old in 1978-- all the way to Ruben so he can try to get this information. Oh yeah, and then the new President comes along to take out Tangent, forcing everyone to go on the run and find out what really happened. And it's a whopper!
On the one hand: the mystery is as good as ever, and you do find out what's behind it all, what the motivations are, and why Travis is the key linchpin of it all. It's still gripping as all hell.
On the other hand...the ending is left wide open. I'll get into it in the even-further-down spoiler cut space, but that pretty much made the trilogy fizzle for me. Plus I was frustrated and a bit pissed off. It just made me go, "Dammit!" a lot. I wouldn't retroactively say, "Don't read the series now that I know how it ended," mind you, but I feel like readers should be warned that on some level, you don't leave this world satisfied/resolved. And that knocked down the review a star for me. But...well, others may be just fine with that ending being open, under the circumstances of the plot. It may be a personal preference. If I were the author, hell, I'm not sure how I'd end it either. Maybe leaving it open is the best ending? I don't know. But...yeah, it affected me in a "grrrrr" sort of way.
Spoiler space #2: the ending.
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I love that the explanation for the Breach boils down to, "Eternally youthful future versions of us" (Garner and Travis, anyway--beats me what happened to the ladies)" flew off planet, found out later the world was destroyed, and this is their 30+ year plan to come back and save it." However, the plan that the crew of the Deep Sky came up with was to kill the 20 millino people who were most likely to lead to Earth's destruction. Travis, as one of the future dudes in on this plan, is left to decide all on his own whether or not to go along with their plan. Now we know why Old Future Paige #1 and Old Future Travis #1 sent their messages back. Presumably they have different POV's on this.
What does Travis decide? He doesn't. Like Scarlett O'Hara, he'll worry about it tomorrow. And that's how it ends.
I'm not sure if I am misunderstanding the ending or not. I suspect I am supposed to guess/intuit how it may end. I reread it several times and dammit, I'm still not sure. And I'm frustrated to not have it resolved one way or the other, because I just wanna know after all of this. It is irritating to just leave it at, "who knows, could go either way."
Maybe there is going to be a fourth book?
Also, 20 millions < x billions. Why would Paige be against that?
Posted by: Virtual | December 30, 2012 at 09:44 PM