nice story

the first story has to do with the planet of trill. there are riots among the people who are not joined with simbionts. they want equal standing and the truth of the history of the past that has been so well hidden. when the rioting is at it's worse, ezra embarks on a dangerous journey to find the truth. what she finds out could either help or destroy trill.
i thought that this story was well thought out and a real pleasure to read.

the second story is about bajor. according to the back of the book, captain kira would play a big role in the story. she was thrown in almost as an afterthought. the story spent too much time jumping to too many unknown people to be really interesting, and they spent too much time on sisko and his everyday life. there is a nice piece on jake though. any kira fans will be sadly disappointed. the small part she has was so predictable they might as well have left it out.

I enjoyed both stories

The Trill story is fantastic, although it does not start out that way. It begins with a now typical Trek story: the people of Trill are frightened, and thus angry at their government, which happens to be habitually secretive, and the extremists are turning to violence. The characterisations are good, although they seem a little lacking in depth. The descriptions are very good, although sometimes they get a bit wordy and excessive. Do they need to describe everything, even once-off things that don't impact the story? What the characters do, and their commentary on why, is very clearly written and done well. The authors have a neat trick of switching to minor characters to describe what Bashir or Dax is doing, and why, which also works very well.

I found the story to be good but not particularly exciting or unique, up to the middle where one of the characters informs Dax that she's going where no one has gone before ... on her own home planet. After that, it's incredible. It has everything: a society on the verge of total chaos, desperate combat scenes, heroic medical drama, and moral debates. Most impressive of all was the voyage of discovery made by Dax. I enjoyed this story tremendously.

The Bajor story is a love story, along with catching us up on the lives of everyone not in another Worlds story, and events on Bajor generally. The characterisations are excellent, as they need to be since they are the core of the story. The descriptions are vivid instead of specific; we are told what we need to see rather than everything (in some contrast to the first story). That worked well. The event scenes (only some qualify as `action' scenes) are clear and well written. The story starts off very low key and took some time to get going. However, the plotting of the romance was good, if perhaps with a rushed ending, and worked in well with the other parts of the story. The one major complaint I have is that the epilogue was full of vague `A Big Threat is Coming' ruminations. There is enough of a transition feel to this story that waving the fact in our faces was quite unnecessary. This story did not impress me as much as the first did, but I enjoyed it quite a lot as well.

Another solid chapter in the DS9 saga

I had not expected to like the story set on Trill, being that I've developed nothing but distain for Ezri and Julian during the past few books, but I found Julian to be incredibly sympathetic during this tale, and while Ezri was still annoying, the scene were she descended into the depths of the symbiot pools was fascinating. The movement on the Julian/Ezri relationship was, I think, a long time coming, but it still hit me like a shot in the guts. I'm looking forward to see where this storyline goes. This story (and most of the relaunch for that matter) has done a nice job on taking one of the lamest TNG episodes and making something interesting and entertaining out of it.

The Bajor story was probably my favorite so far in the mini-series. The continuation of Jake's story stood out as a high point, though I would have liked to have seen a longer courtship with his new love interest. Again, I find it interesting that these stories are going back to some of the older (and in some cases hokier) episodes and adding depth and meaning to those stories. I also LOVED the references to my story, Ha'mara.

All in all, this book was pretty solid. I can't wait to see where all this is going.