There's so much that's unclear to me about this story, but that's kind of the point. I love it. The world that's been crafted here is so interesting and layered, and I have to know how it ends.

However, the book loses its first 0.5 star for me because it's just too vague sometimes; the author will describe a scene but allows you to connect the dots on not only what it means but also what is actually happening. A lot of this works, but sometimes it goes just a bit too far and renders passages of the book meaningless without a slow, very careful re-read of the passage to parse what's being described.

If you like Annihilation, you might like this. It's paced similarly, with a slow drip of information at first to set up the mystery, and then a faster and faster pace as the book approaches its end and things go well and truly off the rails. But it definitely drags in a way the first book didn't. It feels like it's about 100 pages too long, and that knocks off another 0.5 stars for me.

If you find Annihilation provided too few answers for the mysteries it set up, you won't like this. Authority gives a few more concrete details than the first book, but still leaves plenty unresolved. In fact, it sets up even more questions that it leaves unanswered, though these are less interesting than the mysteries of the first novel so it's not a big loss.

This book feels very transitional, as second in trilogy books often do. Annihilation sets up the vibes, the central nugget of the plot. Authority takes that nugget, expands on it, and moves the overall series plot forward, but has little in the way of interesting plot of its own outside of a few choice twists/reveals/scenes. Nothing is really started and finished in this book, it's simply filling in the gaps of what happened in the time between the first and third books. And I think it accomplishes that purpose, but some readers might be turned off by banal office politics when there's an unknowable eldritch bio-horror lurking nearby.