I definitely feel like this book suffers from second novel syndrome, where you spend your whole life working on and polishing your first novel to get it good enough to be published, and then your publisher says "Okay, now you have a year (or less) to write the sequel!" There are still a lot of good things here, but not as many as in the first book.

BUT READ MIND STORM. IT IS GREAT. AND I COULDN'T FIGURE OUT WHY NOBODY WAS TALKING ABOUT IT.