Tldr: 🫤

Well, these Foundation books so far are so inconsistent with it's quality.
There's always some great and captivating moments that have me on the edge of my seat, and the rest are absolutely dreadful, dull and boring.

An issue I had with the first book and didn't mention was present in the second book but is again quite prevalent here is that majority of the characters are so indistinctive, lacking depth and individuality.

And fuck me their names! Why are the character names in this series SO FUCKING TERRIBLE?
All the names so far in this series have been goddamn awful, like as if they came from an online sci-fi name generator.
I'm going to list some names:

Absolutely horrendous, they are completely unmemorable. And it's even worse because it's every few chapters that a few new characters with unmemorable names and unremarkable personalities are introduced and then never seen again. This makes the whole thing so disjointed.
So what makes them so unremarkable? Because they all speak the same and act the same. All they do is political or scientific dumps.

So, again, this book was split into two parts,
1.) Search by the Mule
2.) Search by the Foundation.
And, again, part one is incredible and part two is a big mixed bag with sprinkles of goodness.

For part one, it was the best of the book, seriously, it was captivating, thrilling, interesting and just down right awesome. One thing though, this was to be the conclusion to the ending cliffhanger of the previous book, and I think that was a terrible decision. Part one of this book was so short, and it could have been left at the end of the previous book as a part three or something. This felt like two different books in one.

Part two, however, was just meh.
The apparent twist at the end I figured out around the 40% mark.
It had great potential, seriously, these group of conspirators against rhe Second Foundation had to try to find them and navigate around their possible influence while not knowing what could be influenced by the Second Foundation. Introducing that doubt, could have made an incredible element across the book or focused on more.

There even could have been this awesome faux-twist where they are convinced there's no Second Foundation and they were a figment to be a boogeyman to prevent action against the First Foundation, and the anomalies found in people's brains with the Encephalograph could actually be acolytes or descendants of The Mule with the same mutant ability as him, trying to take down the Foundation in secret. That was totally a theory of mine and could have been a good narrative feint or red herring.

So, part one was amazing, part two was meh, and majority of this book was part two, therefore this is a 3.5 rating. If part one wasn't as amazing, I'd be scoring this a 3 or lower.

Now I'm back to feeling how I did at the end of the first book, slightly dreading reading the next book. 

I legit feel like this: 🫤