Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Another author would get 3 stars for this. Mr. Stephenson gets 2 because I expect better from him, especially at a high price. Short version: The book is interesting, sometimes funny, often shallow. The characters are one-dimensional (except Rebecca). The military jargon is bad. The use of letters/diaries/journals as the narrative works ok, but there's no framing story to explain why these things are collected, or by whom. The mechanics of magic are believable enough to suspend disbelief. I read at least one volume of the Baroque Cycle (The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World) every year. The characters are believable, consistent, and so well-developed over their lives that I can jump back into Quicksilver and remember young Eliza after having last read about older pock-marked Eliza in SotW and feel like I'm meeting her again. It takes place across such important historical events and does such a good job of putting characters in places of import with humor and subtlety that make it all just so fascinating. I've also read a lot of Clancy's Ryan books. Clancy did a lot of collaborative stuff, too. I remember reading the first Net Force book. I feel about The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O (dodo) the same way as I do about Net Force. It was fun. I remember liking the plot and the character interactions, but I can tell you nothing now of substance about any of them. Prior military, I think? One had a Plymouth Prowler? They were throw-away books. Fun, but not meaningful. Dodo feels like a read-and-forget novel that is leading into a series. It ends without resolution, and given that the former work these authors did together was a number of books in series, I'm expecting to see more of these. If they show, I'll wait for the reviews before deciding if it's worth the time/money. There are many things touched on but never utilized that a good edit would have removed, unless they will be needed later. Storing data in an ODEC, for example. In closing.. read it if you've got the time and the price comes down, but if you are a fan of NS, lower your expectations.