Yeah, agreed with basically everything you said about Santa Olivia there. And then I went diving into the comments to see if there was talk of the sequel, and it sounds like the core issue is exactly as I anticipated: it's just a very different book, because it has to be. And the book it sounds like it is just doesn't interest me as much.

(I do have some sympathy for writing the kind of story where a later book has to be really different, because that's the logical payoff of what you did in the first one. But you do run the obvious risk of losing your readers.)

I'd like Clarke to recover her health enough to be able to write more, period.