Unbound (The Havoc Chronicles Book 2)

Unbound (The Havoc Chronicles Book 2)
by
Brant Williams

The first book ends rather abruptly, but fortunately this book picks up the action a couple of hours later. Not only does Unbound pick up the action where Williams left off with book 1, but his writing style as well. On the whole this book is much better written than the first one, with the end of it being even better written in my opinion than the beginning.
The first half of the book falls prey to one of the major problems of the first book though, and that is Williams does not know what it's like to be a 16 year old girl, and so the narrator who happens to be just that, often seems to not be that girl. The first half of the book is also as I described it to my friend today, the I-didn't-save-the-drama-for-my-mama section. First, because it's all about Madison (the narrator) being head-over-heals-in-love with which ever boy/man is standing nearest to her and second, because on nearly a dozen occasions, Williams pulls the move of using the extended-hyphenated-descriptor-clause. That's unfortunate, but he does stop doing that in the second half of the book.
I have nothing against romance or melodrama in a book. If it advances the story or develops a character, then go for it. But if it's there because you're trying to appeal to a certain market and not dong one of the two above mentioned things at the same time, don't do it. Actually, I know what it's like to get off on a tangent when writing a novel, so I just want to know what the editor was (not) doing?
I'm kind of harshing on Williams, because when he's writing well, it's quite good. Parts of this book are quite good in my opinion. He is just not very consistent yet. But, I will say that just like book 1, give Unbound a chance and you'll find out it's worth it.
Williams continues to do some new and exciting stuff, though not as much this time out. In it's place he adds in a political element and exposes us to more of the Berzerker and Binder world, both of which are good things and add another layer of interesting. As opposed to the first book where I felt Williams always took the safe route with the characters, contextually speaking of course, he didn't do that this time out. Some things need to happen for the story to work, and it turns out that Mr. Williams is willing to do them. I'm impressed that he did them.
This book is a quick read. I'm the slowest reader your are ever going to meet and the book took me about 9 hours to read. I'm quessing most people would be able to read this in about half to a third of the time that I did. That doesn't seem like a bad time risk.
I do think that this book is more the second half of the first book than it is the second book of the chronicles. But that could be just because the ending of the first book was so abrupt and because I'm used to reading Robert Jordan, George R. R. Martin and J. K. Rowling.
There is no official word on just how many books there will be in the Havoc Chronicles, but in the acknowledgements at the end of the book, Williams gives the title of the third book, which will be out in a year and a half if there is as much time between 2 & 3 as there was between 1 & 2.

Unbound at Amazon.com