What made the original trilogy work so well, even when the story started to fall apart in the end, was momentum. They were sparse, aggressively paced books that were very hard to put down.

That was missing here. Every time I felt like the story was about to blast off, it stopped dead. There were so many characters, but only a couple of them were at all memorable. If I didn’t know better I would have thought this was a different author.

It was a chore to finish this. There is no magic here. I hope the movie makes some real changes.