Children of Memory

I seem to be liking each book of this series less. All the novelty that excited me of the first book now just feels like a retread as the author explores a variant of the theme in a new way. This particular variant (or the two of them) was a bit uninteresting. The Corvids were fun but unconvincing, and the other sentience stuff, well, it was awfully muddled.

Mostly I was frustrated with the structure of the book. It started as an interesting small town mystery / horror story, the Big Secret of the town, a sort of Children of the Corn kind of thing. Then it got repeated in strange and confusing ways, the author's big conceit, but it just felt repetitious and not-enlightening. Meanwhile I really didn't care for the recurring characters from previous books, the narrators with perspective. Not well written, not compelling.

Really nothing much came together for me. Maybe it would have been more interesting to just read a straight story about the colony, Liff, the secret of Remembrance and the Watchers and the Seccers. Just tell that story direct and leave the rest out. But then it wouldn't be Children of Time.