Title: Dune Messiah
Author: Frank Herbert
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 224
Rating: 3.5/5
I buddy read this book with a few BookTube friends as part of Duneuary take two. In the first Duneuary, we read the first Dune book during January 2018, and so for the second one we decided to read this, the second book in the series.
Honestly, it’s a little jarring to go to a book this short after how epic in scope the first book was, and this feels just like a single section of that book. I also agree with the criticism that some of my friends had, which mainly centred around how this feels a bit like it’s so busy setting up the next book in the series that it forgets to be a full book in its own right.
That said, I do think this adds a lot to the Dune mythos, and there were a few developments here and there that took me by surprise. I also liked the intrigue of the diplomacy and the way that every decision had to be carefully weighed out because of how big the stakes were. I just thought it was a shame that Herbert brought a character back from the dead when there wasn’t really any need to. It devalues death.
