Children Of Ruin
This book did not go where I expected it to. Sure, it has a species uplift plot which is similar to Children of Time, but that's not all that's happening here. If the previous book was about refugees and redemption, this book is about alternative ways of structuring societies (I don't want to ruin the surprise by being too specific). Let's just say some of these societies are small and some are big, but they both cooperate to achieve their goals better than perhaps our society does. There's definitely a pattern forming about how books in this series resolve their conflicts. I'm not normally into horror as a genre, and there are definitely horror elements to this story. I probably wouldn't have bought this book if I'd known how it was going to be different from the previous one. That said, the horror element decreases after a mid-book peak and overall I enjoyed the story although not as much as that of the first book in the series.