I'll be honest fourteen year-old me would have loved this series with a fiery passion. Twenty-Four year-old me likes it well enough. I think Neil Gaiman captures the essence of the punk rock/pre-emo goth spirit. The story is complex and whole style of the artwork is very visceral. To be honest the shift of focus away from Morpheus helped greatly in my liking of this volume. I'm on the fence with his character. Every time I start to like him he does something or we learn something about him that's just beyond fucked up. We also get to meet two more members of his family the Endless, in addition to Death (who we met last volume) we meet the androgynous Desire and his/her twin sister Despair. They are not fans of Dream at all and this will probably be where most of the conflict arises in the following issues. Overall I liked it better than the fist volume and am hoping it continues to get better.

Well this book certainly took me a long time to read. Honestly I feel like the story didn't become terribly compelling until the final third of the book.

Maybe if you've never heard of Lord of the Flies it's a different experience. Or maybe if you read it in school and had to break it down chapter by chapter, symbol by symbol (it's just chock full of symbolism) it would be a different experience.

I don't know, for me I certainly liked different aspects of the book. The Jack/Ralph dynamic, the us-them of the guilt over Simon for Ralph's band. While I'm a cautious optimist at heart I definitely understand and respect the flawed picture of society and to a larger extent, humanity itself, that Golding paints. Maybe that's the crux of it. This is the kind of book that needs to be discussed and dissected. That might have made it a bit more enjoyable for me. But as it stands I'm glad I read it and I'm glad that it's (finally) over with.