Children of Strife

Oh, that was excellent. Another epic chapter in the Children of Time series that feels comfortably familiar, and yet goes places the first three didn't.

What kind of world would you end up with if you let the entitled tech-bros and self-important billionaires have a hand in the design? Trust me, whatever you just imagined is only a shadow of what we get here. The villains (and there are villains) are deliciously villainous, but sufficiently lacking in self awareness to not consider themselves the villains.

And the heroes? A broken Human, a pair of very confused spiders, a fragment of the Kern sentience, and Cato the punchy mantis shrimp. And if you don't absolutely love Cato and his insane heroics by the end of the book, well, I guess there's no hope for you.

Where the first three books in this series were all essentially standalones, with knowledge of the others being optional, for this one I'd definitely recommend at least having read Children of Memory. If you haven't, you can still read this one, but if you have then this one will give you so much more. And if you haven't read any of the others yet, what are you waiting for?

Definitely another five out of five from me.