Children of Dune is a tough read, and at times it feels like it's just dragging on with random metaphors and meaningless statements, but at the end is a tremendous climax with page after page of revelations and action. It's a worthy read, but I think I'm going to need to take a break for a simpler novel after this.

At the heart of Children of Dune lies a complex set of interwoven plans that the various cast enact upon each other, and like game theory, the cast predict the moves of each other and devise counterplans that also get countered, with so many layers that the plans and outcomes need to be directly explained to the reader. I typically despise Telling instead of Showing, but even being lead to the solution, I struggle to understand why things are unfolding the way they are. This leads to the best parts of the novel: characters that are meant to be post/superhuman truly are. They think and act beyond a layperson's predictions, and to pull that off as a human author, I applaud Frank Herbert and his imagination.

On the other hand, the dense plot is not helped by equally dense scenes. Characters speak in riddles and metaphors, resulting in conversations that require multiple reads before you tease out all the meaning. This means that there are large chunks of the book that flew over my head, and I'm not personally looking for a novel that's an intellectual challenge like a textbook teaching me new subject matter.

All that said, Children of Dune is a worthy successor to the original Dune. I enjoyed it and recommend it. Now I need a vacation.

Within the safety of spoiler tags... the novel is also a bit of a retread of Dune except without the military element. We ultimately get an Atreides vs Harkonnen battle, though the latter through Alia and the former through many, many elements of the family retainers. House Corrino is around as before, inserting themselves but really a secondary element and they get played pretty well. Finally, the children once more outshine the parents...

Also, I'm not sure how Frank Herbert managed a novel that is almost entirely combat by conversation.

But we're onto the Golden Path and Leto II is doing what Paul was afraid to do, so I suppose by design, Dune 3 has to be a retread of Dune 1. I'm excited to see what happens in the fourth novel, and though I know a lot by absorbing elements around the internet, I'm sure there are plenty of surprises in store.