This follow-up to Paradise suffered from the opposite problems that turned me off to that one. Where paradise was too dense and too spread out, this novel felt more like the first draft of a novel that was meant to be expanded and never was. It's a good story, but it's a story that doesn't go much deeper than its own surface, which is highly uncharacteristic of Morrison's work. Maybe she felt some of the same things about Paradise i mentioned in my review of that one (or other misgivings I didn't mention) and tried to go all Cormac McCarthy, just strip the thing down to the bare bones and see how it works. It works for McCarthy's later novels. The same is not true of Morrison's.