Star Trek Destiny #2: Mere Mortals by David Mack continues the trilogy that I began discussing on Monday. We find our crews separated across not only vast distances but also by time itself. Hernandez and 3 members of her crew are stranded with the Caeliar in the 1500s trying to find a suitable planet to inhabit without any hope of returning to their lives back on Earth in their time. Riker and the crew of Titan have reached the homeworld of the Caeliar in the present day and things do not go according to plan...in fact events quickly snowball out of Riker's control. Meanwhile, Picard and Dax are going through subspace tunnels in the style of eeny, meeney, miney, moe trying to find the one which will lead them to the Borg's point of origin and hopefully onto a path of defeating them. 

The best parts of this installment were those which followed Hernandez's struggles to adjust to her new existence and the glimpses of the Federation President scrabbling to put together a formidable force to defeat the approaching Borg Armada. There are two reasons I think that I preferred these two storylines: I still haven't watched Nemesis and still feel confused by this reality and Mack's depiction of familiar faces did not sit right with me particularly in regards to Picard. Sometimes I find that the best Star Trek novelizations are the ones where the author focuses more on the storyline element and less on the characters which the audience typically knows really well. In this case, Mack's description of the Caeliar race and their culture coupled with the (unknown to me at least) Captain Hernandez and her never-ending quest to escape/understand her captors was exactly what I wanted in a great sci-fi novel. Conversely, the dramatic characterization of Riker's faltering marriage and Picard's inner struggles against the Borg felt stilted and forced. 

By this point, I was way too invested not to continue so if you're wondering how I felt about the conclusion you can check back next week for that (although hopefully you're checking every day (-:). 7/10 for book 2 in this trilogy.

What's Up Next: The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity by Byron Reese

What I'm Currently Reading: Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond and The Science of Supervillains by Lois H. Gresh & Robert Weinberg

The book follows the story of three boys -Crispin, Myles and Jude who have been taken as ward by a mysterious rich man. 
The three get the life most people can only dream of. 
Too good to be true, right?

As it turns out later there's something common between the adolescents and they were not just chosen randomly.
The very way the story is told gives off the feeling something is going to happen. And I mean something very, very bad. 

It was suspenseful at first, all right.

However I felt like at some point I am just waiting for THAT something to happen...

And WOAH, it actually happens- literally in the last chapters. 
Now here comes my problem. 
I know, the action was building for that moment of discoveries and revelations/ realizations the whole time. But to me it all felt a bit too over- dramatic and over the top. 

In short- there is a lot of mystery, a pinch of romance /although not much focus on it, but there are some hot scenes among the whole waiting-for-the-storm-to-come /.

And I love the way Erastes works with the very language. It was the plot development that didn't really work for me.