** spoiler alert ** How many stars do you give a book that starts off good, wanders around dully in the middle, and then becomes offensively horrible at the end? Do you average 5, 3, and 1 star? Do you give it 2 because of the overall picture? Do you give it 1 because it's doubly bad to start out promising and then mislead the reader?

I'm in the last category.

I'm 90% finished, and I think I'm not going to make it much further. I loved the first two books, but this one is sort of awful. It started out with a good mystery: who are the gods and how does this planet relate to the other, but that got resolved about 3/4 of the way through the book, somehow the struggles on Lusitania seem mostly tedious and obnoxious. All of this is fine though, all it did was impact my reading speed. Instead of chewing through the book, I read it at a casual pace. On the other hand, what happens at about 90% of the way through the book appeals only to people who have absolutely no grasp of science, or buy into that whole J.Z. Knight (the frustrated housewife who started channelling a 35000 opponent of atlantis and suddenly got rich) cult recruitment film: What the Bleep do we know?

I love the first two and this one started out well, but it explodes in a gigantic ridiculous Deus ex Machina event that reinforces that Orson Scott Card knows little about science, and expects the same from you.

Bleagh.

P.S. Just so you know, I lost all will to read this book right at the end. So I never actually finished the book. I asked my buddy who had initially warned me about it what happened and I call that good. I can't bear to read any more.