Cradle is one of my favorite popcorn reads, having maintained a level of quality (and a rapid release scheduled) over 12 books that's really admirable. It's not deep literature by any means, just breezy Western cultivation novels, novelized comics. That said, they're really fun. They're a good way to spend a few afternoons knowing pretty much exactly what you're getting.

Waybound is not one of my favorite Cradle novels. It's too full of fighting with not enough moments to breath. The characters have grown too fast; concepts that have been half-established are used liberally and the many fight scenes have a tendency to become ridiculous with the power scaling. They're fun scenes, sure, but at this point the fights are a little too abstract for my liking, it feels like there are almost no consequences to battle until the author decides there should be at some arbitrary point.

The characters also spend a disappointingly little amount of time interacting with each other. Some of the best moments in these novels come in the points between fights, where there's some levity mixed in. In Waybound, the characters aren't given time to breathe.

This culminates in a novel that feels a bit rushed. I think I would've greatly enjoyed this novel - instead of putting it somewhere on the lower end of the Cradle books - had it been split in two, with the crew finishing up on Cradle in the first book and fleshing out everything that happens after in the finale. As it stands, the entire conceit of the series is attained and examined in the last 10% of the novel, and that's disappointing for a series this long.