The Skill of Our Hands

I loved and raved about the eponymous first book in this series about centuries-old intellects who jump to new bodies when their old one dies and spend their lives trying to improve the world through small tweaks to events and mental suasion of people in pivotal roles, but I really felt as though this sequel missed the mark.

The narrative, consisting of chapters from the point of view of the various main characters, is constantly broken up with interjected asides from the least likeable character. Mostly these asides don't really add meaningful content but serve to foreshadow that things would later prove to be different than they seemed, and I found them unbelievably annoying, unnecessary, and destructive to narrative cohesion. I thought that the plot was weak and disjointed; perhaps the asides were intended to bolster it. If so, they failed in that regard. I am disappoint. I hope the next entry in the series will match the quality of the first one.