I wanted to like this. I wanted to like this so much. I thought Space Opera did something new and fresh and exciting, and I was so eager to see what could be done with the sequel. The problem, though, is that the narrative voice that made Space Opera so fresh and new was the same voice here, given such free rein that it overpowered all the other things we need in a novel. Every character had a tendency to monologue in the identical matching narrative voice; and the side-quests into, say, overly stalled board meetings, or the incompetent team activities of the Metagalactic Grand Prix Semi-finals, felt self-indulgent and slow. The last 10-15% or so were constructed to build off certain events and clues that were dropped earlier, but the wildly wide-ranging narrative approach from the first 85% of the book felt so slow and incoherent that the eventual emotional pay-off just didn't land. The building blocks were in place for something really terrific; but unlike the first block, the coherence of the rest of the book was too tenuous to actually tie together the key things effectively.