A review by mormengil
METRO 2034. The sequel to Metro 2033.: American edition by Dmitry Glukhovsky

4.0

A lot of people, fans of Metro 2033, seem to dislike this one. I don't really get why. Maybe because this one does not feature a big tour of the metro world like the previous one, or maybe because Artyom is not the main character. Or maybe because they dislike how some of the new faces are written.

Whatever the case, people do not like this one as much as the first one, and I went in expecting a lesser experience, and I did not really get one that was significantly lesser to be honest. It is still the same world, and the tone of the book while not identical, is pretty close to that of the original.

I liked everything about it, except a very unfortunate snippet. That small part, could be interpreted as the author claiming women are of a parasitic nature. I am fairly certain that a lot is lost in translation here, and the author was trying to be more poetic, but cultural differences and the ever present problems of cross cultural translating might be at fault here. That said, that passage did annoy me as written and I could not 100% overlook it. It didn't spoil the book for me though.

There is another problem with this book though from where I am standing. The character of Sasha, is a bit all over the place, a problem that spills over in the third part of the trilogy. She is not written as well as other characters, and there is a bit of an awkwardness surrounding her, as if the author wasn't sure exactly how to make her be what he wanted her to be.

For the above reasons, I consider Metro 2034 weaker than metro 2033, but nowhere near as bad or a "disaster" of a book others found it to be.