Read book one & loathed it. I planned to get to this & I might someday...but for now, I'm logging it as ejected and awarding it one star based on my opinion of the preceding novel, which was too corny for my tastes.

Særpræget og noget spøjs roman (som jeg virkeligt godt kunne lide). Umiddelbart hænger den ikke meget sammen med Quicksilver, men jeg gætter på at resten af serien nok skal få bundet en fin sløjfe på det forhold.

The characters are interesting in this book - I like Eliza and Jack. It tells of a different perspective during the same time period as the first book - but there are no connections (well limited connections) between characters in the first book and this one. I listened to this as an audio book and it was a great performance. The story is sort of lacking a purpose other then to trace the time of a couple of characters. While entertaining, you are left sort of wondering what the purpose of the story is.

A couple years went by between my reading the first book in this series and getting my hands on the second, but given how little the characters and events in this book overlap with the first, it really doesn't matter.

Where the first book followed Daniel Waterhouse, Natural Philosopher and scion of a staunch, politically active Puritan family, and took place mostly in England, this book follows "Half-Cocked" Jack Shaftoe (whose nickname refers as much to an anatomical peculiarity of his as it does to his spontaneous and intemperate disposition) and a mysterious, beautiful and very clever woman named Eliza, and takes place mostly on the European continent.

It also has much less of an emphasis on 17th-century science than the first book, delving more into that era's political and economic developments. (Indeed, so much of the action of this book revolves around schemes relating to the buying and selling of shares of stock that I was both bored and somewhat confused for long stretches in the middle. Finance is like intellectual Kryptonite to me; can't understand it, have zero interest in understanding it.)

Anyway, the characters. Half-Cocked Jack sounds like someone took the most dramatic, colorful elements from Dickens (Jack's motherless childhood with his brother Bob, earning money hanging onto condemned men's legs as they swung from the gallows, ensuring a somewhat quicker death), Hunter S. Thompson (Jack is slowly losing his mind to syphilis, and as his side of the story progresses he becomes increasingly prone to vivid hallucinations which he cannot distinguish from reality), Jonathan Swift (in the frankly scatological descriptions of the kind of life Jack leads - hygiene is apparently a luxury a 17th-century Vagabond learns to do without), John Kennedy Toole and Gary Shteyngart (Jack's lewdness, sensuality and his knack for accidental heroism), and blended them all together in a single character. The actual experience of reading about this character's adventures is only slightly less awesome than whatever you've conjured up in your head while reading the previous sentence; the only problem is that they're so disjointed and episodic there's no sense of narrative momentum, just one damn thing after another.

The other main character is Eliza, a beautiful woman Jack rescues from a Turkish army camp during one of his brief spells of soldiering. When she first appeared, I wasn't sure I'd like her: her first interaction with Jack is a strained, eyeroll-inducing stretch of sexualized banter revolving around the tired, ages-old "battle of the sexes" scenario: the man has every kind of power imaginable over the woman, but because he desires her, that somehow evens the scales, or even secretly gives her the upper hand. Whatever. But luckily, Eliza is more than that: she's incredibly clever and a gifted storyteller, spinning tall tales that captivate Jack, who has lived more tall tales than most people have even heard. Like Scheherazade, she doles out portions of her life story (how she came to be a slave in a Turkish officer's tent, for instance, when she is a European woman who speaks English) strategically to make sure Jack keeps her with him long enough for her to get where she wants to go, which is Amsterdam.

Once Eliza gets to Amsterdam, she and Jack split up; she stays put, hoping to get in on the expanding mercantile economy and getting swept up in a scheme involving shares in a silver mine somewhere in the mountains of Germany, which gets her running in such high-rolling circles that she runs into a couple of lordly types who seize the opportunity to use her to further their various political intrigues. Her story gets more and more interesting and suspenseful as the stakes of her game rise and the rules get more complex; Jack's, on the other hand, seems to lose steam once he parts company with her. He continues to wander around Europe, with some vague notions of selling the fine warhorse and other loot he picked up in Turkey and thereby financing x more years of Vagabond life, and maybe also leaving something for his children. (He's never met them, but he knows he has some). He goes from place to place, stuff happens to him, he is increasingly unable to distinguish what's really happening from his hallucinations, which tend to resemble Elizabethan morality plays. It's all fairly anticlimactic, even though there are a couple of really awesome episodes. The book seems arbitrarily cut off at the end, for both of them, though. Eliza's arc in particular still seems to be building toward a future climax when the narrative ends and the (very long) section cataloguing the Dramatis Personae begins.

I read "Quicksilver", the first in this series a few months ago .. and it was an interesting "almost historical" novel, with the Newton/Leibniz rivalry as a background with bits of the English Civil War and the Restoration thrown in along with a completely fictional Daniel Waterhouse and his fictional pre-MIT workshop where he's building a pre-Babbage difference engine. Cool stuff. Anyway, this book starts a parallel thread that is much more adventuresome, with sword fights, galloping horses, conspiracies, more Leibniz, William of Orange, John Churchill, and host of others. Lots of fun, and done with Neal Stephenson's typical attention to detail and background to go with the interesting characters.

Never got any better than the opening vignette. Language and ideas are solid stephenson. Interesting story, but lost direction and cohesion toward the end. Apparently it's the middle of the original quicksilver, but there was a lot of meandering...

I am going to finish the cycle this time, I swear! I think it was just so daunting when it wasn't broken up into these nice bite sized chunks. I am reading them through Audible now, and the narration of course brings them a little more to life for me. We'll see, but this is one of my goals this year!

Part two of the first Cycle takes a huge departure from the first book that mainly revolved around science and a richly detailed England to follow Jack, the self-styled King of the Vagabonds in this traveling adventure around all of Europe in the late sixteen-hundreds.

Include spies, a huge political intrigue, hanging out with all the lower sorts, and enough scrapes, tosses, and near-death experiences for any taste. Jack doesn't really have the ear of anyone, let alone a king, but what he does have is a talent for getting into the biggest messes.

What makes this special is not only the characters, which are a serious hoot but the amount of research and a perfect inclusion of real history and events on a scale I've never before seen. This might as well be a Masters course in history if it hadn't been written so excitingly and humorously.

I think I might have enjoyed this one even more than the first book in the Cycle, but only in terms of pure adventure and sneakily introduced economics, medicine, and a good idea about how the REST of the world lived during these times. Jack's about as low as they come. :)

I totally recommend this for Historical Fiction lovers everywhere. :)

Fun romp around the world of the 1600s! And great to meet Jack and Eliza, who seem like they’re going to be important going forward in the series. Found it a bit hard to follow at points, but overall enjoyed.

I wasn't for sure what to expect from this book after the first in the series was such a well written historical fiction of early science. According to the reviews I read, this was nothing like the first (with the exception of the setting being the same time period). So while I wasn't for sure what to expect, I didn't think I would laugh so much. This book was so enjoyable. The characters were real people, living in a hard world. They knew the world was hard, but they didn't know it could be any different. In the introduction, Neal Stephenson tells us that he wants to tell the story of how a poor person in this time lived. Now the story does seem to develop the overall theme, however only moderately so, in my opinion. I don't have the words to describe "Half Cock Jack" he is one of the most interesting and enjoyable characters I have ever come across. He is not always likable, but he is never dull.

Even though this book is tagged by many as "science fiction" please know that it is such a minor aspect of the overall plot that if you didn't know what you were looking for, you'd miss it. There are some rated R parts so reader beware.

The ending does have a feel of being a book in a series, but no cliff hanger here.

Moreso than in Qucksilver, the character of Jack Shaftoe allows Stephenson's dry wit to shine, and I snickered and chortled my way through The King of The Vagabonds. The spot-on humor (and the fact that it's obviously supposed to resemble a picaresque novel) allow me to forgive it for its meandering plot. I was meta-amused by the fact that, despite having an illiterate main character, Stephenson still managed to work in Leibniz so he could satisfy his science boner. 4 stars in stead of 5 for the bullshit cliffhanger ending, though.

Full of action and compelling characters.