Interspecies-DNA: My favorite genre of music

Sipaj everyone:

Having finished the sequel, I am surprised to say that I don't know how I feel about it. Having felt so strongly about the first book, and actually still feeling strongly about it, I am oddly in the position of feeling ambivalent about this one. I am not sure if it is the change in temporal narration, or perhaps the characters are not as easy for me to identify with; I am not sure, and I hope to take some meaning out of these characters come class on Tuesday.

Regardless of my aggregate opinion on the book, I have to say that the unexpected method by which Emilio was taken to Rakhat again was something I did not foresee, even with the Camorra ties constantly being thrown in my face as the reader. I was expecting some sort of miraculous event to change his mind, and that never happened until he heard the music discovered by Isaac. On this subject, I would have to say that Isaac was one of my least favorite characters, mostly due to the narrative always having him insist on his mother coming to him. Something about the repetitive use of that demand wore on me after a while, due to its infernal screaming that Sofia would in fact move, thanks for the heavy-handed foreshadowing... On the other hand, I thoroughly enjoyed Nico's character above and beyond any other in either book, probably because of his combination of love for opera and his expert use of salami to redeem a destroyed man's humanity. In seriousness, the way the author used this character seemed to me as one of the anchors for the title of the book (the conversation amongst Hana'la and her family aside), because for all intents and purposes Nico was a child, and being D'angeli, perhaps was a bit of a reference to this by the author. He took people at their word, tried to do the right thing, always honestly apologized for what he had done wrong, and in the end was arguably the most morally upright of anyone on the second mission. I feel as though his presence on the mission was the most important of any of the others, yet again for reasons that are currently not clear to me (perhaps some of this "sleep" would do me some good....).

In any event, have a good evening, and I feel like "Interspecies-DNA" could go places as a band name...

-Mike