Kevin Sugrue

I love Frank Herbert's Dune series, George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire and Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko series. I really struggled with Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time. Almost half of the book is very dull and slow paced. The alien race are very hard to relate to emotionally, as characters. This succeeds in making the alien's feel alien, but also highly unrelatable too. This makes the book heavy going through the middle. You don't care about the alien civilisation that is laborously described as it evolves socially and technically. The other half of the story concerns the multi-generational colony ship that is the last hope of humanity. While this isn't a new idea, it doesn't need to be. But it does need to be written in a compelling way to make the reader want to complete the story. What definitely didn't help in the Audible version of the book was the narrator, who's character voices can be whiney and/or annoying. This reinforced the lack of empathy felt for characters throughout the book. If you hate Arthur C Clarke and Gentry Lee's Rama series, stay away from this book too. The world building of the aliens is distinctive and novel in Children of Time. But like the fatigue caused in Rama by too little happening, or what does happen being revealed in a way that fails to provoke wonder and excitement. You are left with a proceedural and cultural progress chart of an alien race you can't relate to and want to skip chapters. The good news is the last third of the book has more pace and action and less dull proceedure and exposition. But not enough enjoyment to redeem my review or recommendation score of 2 stars for the book. As someone who enjoys world building, investigation, intrugue and memorable characters who are challenged into action. I still have nightmares of the repeated line 'Where are my monkeys?' - This is meant to be an emotional repeated cry of anguish, but it sounds like an awful, over-used catchphrase. I can't recommend this book. Sorry.