Children of Time

This was a pretty fantastic concept book, but I struggled with the level of detail given to the development of the cultures in this story. I generally have no problem with big detailed books, but multiple times I found myself wondering why I was supposed to care about, for example, the gender politics of giant spiders. Yes, there are parallels to our society, yes, it was a very good thought experiment, and yes, it all came together in a way that made most of the seemingly unnecessary details necessary, but it caused the story to drag and feel drawn out in my opinion.
The same could be said for the human component of the book. I was a bit more connected to them, compared with the spiders because the characters were consistent. Also, it was fun to always be “woken up” in the same ship only to find out a whole new culture and world had developed. Even with them though, I found half the chapters to be kind of irrelevant.
When the book was over, I thought it was a cool way to bring an original story together, and very clever through and through, but the journey of reading this book was a little trying, and I actually switched from reading to listening so that I could just power-listen through the chapters I didn't care about. I found myself waiting impatiently for more to happen, and when stuff finally did happen, it was all at the end and shockingly sudden. I wanted to know how the two civilizations meshed, and that ended up being just one chapter, which disappointed me a little.
So good story, cool idea, but not what I hoped, and I feel that the hype around this book is somewhat misplaced.