Echoing many others, this book is as aggressive in avoiding action as any science fiction novel ever written (with the possible exception of some of Stanislaw Lem's more philosophical works?). As a change of pace, this is an interesting idea, but The Long Earth already broke this ground. Here, we have some compelling personalities and some interesting ideas, but to put it mildly very little happens. No war, just the various issues posed by the long Earth constantly writ small. It's neat to think about, but at some point what you have is the material for a novella expanded out to a novel through landscape and filler. Looking forward, it's awfully hard to convince myself to read #3, given that all of the reviews seem to indicate it is mostly more of the same. At some point, there needs to be some kind of narrative payoff, and it isn't clear it happened here.