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A review by eishe
Children of Dune by Frank Herbert
5.0
There aren't many books that have made me want to lower most of the other ratings in my bookshelf so to match how much I enjoyed reading it, but just as the first book in the series, Children of Dune did that to me.
It wasn't an easy read by any standards, but neither an overly complicated one, mainly due to the fact that I took my time reading it. The language has grown more complicated and there are places where the same sentence has to be read twice, not to understand, but to savor it and search for even more hidden meanings.
If Dune was more action tended, Children of Dune havs turned towards philosophical, religious and political critique, expressed through the events occurring in the universe, with a certain level of action retained. Artificial religion and its mishaps, royal scheming of assassinations and coups d'état, the inevitable destiny, betrayal of trust and love, sacrifice - these are a couple of the most prominent themes here. And even though with this it might seem that the book was filled with philosophical rant (which it in a way was) it was also epic when looking at the greater scale of things.
I usually tend to dislike adult-children characters in all types of fiction, as they rarely seem realistic. In Children of Dune I had this problem only in the very beginning, where it dawned to me, that Leto and Ghanima are everything but children. Most characters were multi-dimensional and saw good levels of character development, especially Leto. The main antagonist - Alia - however did not convince me that well. For me, excluding Leto, two characters stood out of the whole: the Preacher and Farad'n. Preacher's messages were the greatest source of all the critique towards the artificial religion he himself had founded, and it was very enjoyable to see Farad'n grow from a simple pawn in the royalties's game into Harq al'Ada.
Before reading the book I used to love the mini-series, but now it's been converted to "like". Probably the greatest crime they have done is to turn Farad'n from the very interesting character he was in a simple second-plan plot toy.
Overall if you liked Dune, you will most likely at least like Children of Dune. However be warned that it is more complicated and slower.
It wasn't an easy read by any standards, but neither an overly complicated one, mainly due to the fact that I took my time reading it. The language has grown more complicated and there are places where the same sentence has to be read twice, not to understand, but to savor it and search for even more hidden meanings.
If Dune was more action tended, Children of Dune havs turned towards philosophical, religious and political critique, expressed through the events occurring in the universe, with a certain level of action retained. Artificial religion and its mishaps, royal scheming of assassinations and coups d'état, the inevitable destiny, betrayal of trust and love, sacrifice - these are a couple of the most prominent themes here. And even though with this it might seem that the book was filled with philosophical rant (which it in a way was) it was also epic when looking at the greater scale of things.
I usually tend to dislike adult-children characters in all types of fiction, as they rarely seem realistic. In Children of Dune I had this problem only in the very beginning, where it dawned to me, that Leto and Ghanima are everything but children. Most characters were multi-dimensional and saw good levels of character development, especially Leto. The main antagonist - Alia - however did not convince me that well. For me, excluding Leto, two characters stood out of the whole: the Preacher and Farad'n. Preacher's messages were the greatest source of all the critique towards the artificial religion he himself had founded, and it was very enjoyable to see Farad'n grow from a simple pawn in the royalties's game into Harq al'Ada.
Before reading the book I used to love the mini-series, but now it's been converted to "like". Probably the greatest crime they have done is to turn Farad'n from the very interesting character he was in a simple second-plan plot toy.
Overall if you liked Dune, you will most likely at least like Children of Dune. However be warned that it is more complicated and slower.