Rating: 
Summary: Better tahn book one, but still a bit of a letdown
Review: Well, here we are with book 2 of the Janus Gate trilogy. As has been previously mentioned, this is by no means a stand-alone. I have no problem with that; if I'm reading a trilogy and I start with book 2, I deserve any headaches I get while trying to glean what happened in book 1.This book is better than "Present Tense" in that things get moving story-wise, and especially toward the end, I really got into the story. I will definitely be reading book 3, if only to find out how this whole mess gets resolved. Having said all that, I still feel like this series overall would've been much better as either two books or one big book. It feels padded, and although the writing is excellent, there were moments when I couldn't wait to be done with the book to move on to something more intresting. The characters kept examining their situation, trying to figure it out ... but seeming to get nowhere. It seemed more about trying to solve te puzzle than about the characters involved. I really had a hard time rating this book. The writing is excellent; the handling of the characters is dead-on as far as I'm concerned, and when the story's moving it's great. It just seems like it moves in jolots, rather than a smoothe--or even exhillaratingly bumpy--ride. I definitely get the feeling the story as a whole was padded to fit a certain length. I think Pocket Books would do well to focs less on quantity and more on quality. This should've been a two-parter. Or a "Giant" Trek novel. As it stands, to coin a Tolkien phrase, it feels like butter that's been scraped over too much bread.
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