A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor is the Opposite of Beautiful and Just Foolish

I was very excited to read this book since I enjoyed the first one so much and it ended on a cliff hanger. I think Green had a clear and well executed idea with the first book and then he was like "I want to write a sequel but I don't know what to write about so I'm just going to wing it." I really enjoyed the beginning and trying to figure out what was happening and the introduction to all of the pieces of the puzzle, but as soon as April comes in and Carl becomes an active narrator, the story took a wrong turn and just kept messing up and getting off course. The story became so complex that even if I had read every word on the pages, which I didn't, I had to skim the last two hundred, I would still have understood the resolution just as well as I did skimming, due to my second problem with the book: this is the most repetitive book I have ever read. Every chapter one character finds out something and then they spend the next two chapters explaining it to the other characters. This resulted on me completely understanding some aspects and others, often the most important ones, barely being mentioned as after thoughts. It was also very predictable and irritating when the characters just didn't understand what was happening. This also added to the annoyance level of these characters that I had really enjoyed reading in the first book. The first person narration that switched characters in each chapter was needed because of Miranda's story line but very confusing at times and added to the redundancy. I had loved the narration in the first book and was very disappointed with this one.

Speaking of Miranda, her story line was the only interesting one in the book. She was the only character I liked better in this book than the original and I enjoyed her narration.

I also think the book attempted to tell this sci-fi story and have a bunch of different messages about humanity, but it tackled too many and then it didn't feel like there was closure.

Also, I understand that this book is supposed to be like a book the characters are writing in their world to tell their story, and I liked that in the first book and this one too; however, there are too many personal scenes and anecdotes for it to feel like you really are reading a book they are writing. This point goes along with my final thought: why were they constantly talking about porn in the middle of the book? It felt very out of place and took me out of the story completely.

At the end of the day, I would rather have lived with the cliff hanger at the end of the first book then tortured through this one.