'Metro 2034' by Dmitry Glukhovsky
'Metro 2034' by Dmitry Glukhovsky

Probably 3.5 stars rather than 4.

The good

A lot of the good parts from the first book carry on in this one:

  • Humanity surviving in the Moscow metro after nuclear war continues to be a fascinating setting.
  • The dark, somber, gritty reflection on surviving a nuclear war continues to be interesting.
  • Characters traveling from metro to metro and surviving the horrors in between continues to be exciting reading.
  • The writing, or perhaps translation, seems a little better than the first book.

The not so good

The flaw in this book is the characters (warning: minor spoilers ahead):

  • Hunter feels like a ham fisted Jekyll and Hyde. The “there’s a monster inside me” narrative didn’t work particularly well for me.
  • Homer is a slightly more interesting character, but feels like a not so subtle meta reference to the author himself.
  • Sasha is a painful example of a male author not knowing how to write female characters. She’s more or less the only woman in the entire book (which, admittedly, is one more woman than the previous book), and she’s little more than a collection of annoying tropes: she’s always a damsel in distress who needs to be rescued; she’s told that her whole value is in being pretty; her entire goal is to “save” the male characters in the book.

Rating: 4 stars