Recently, I read Jonas Jonasson’s The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window and Disappeared. I really enjoyed the book and laughed out loud a lot. So when I stumbled on a sequel, I naturally had to read it.
Perhaps it is a given that most sequels are bad. I suppose I felt that this would be just as good or close to that when I picked it up. Sadly, I was disappointed. It truly lacked so much of what the first book had.
The first book had many flashbacks to the main characters past experiences, while this book was set almost exclusively in the present. The first book contained some political things, but this book has a lot more of it.
I probably should give you the the Goodreads synopsis here:
It all begins with a hot air balloon trip and three bottles of champagne. Allan and Julius are ready for some spectacular views, but they’re not expecting to land in the sea and be rescued by a North Korean ship, and they could never have imagined that the captain of the ship would be harboring a suitcase full of contraband uranium, on a nuclear weapons mission for Kim Jong-un …
Soon Allan and Julius are at the center of a complex diplomatic crisis involving world figures from the Swedish foreign minister to Angela Merkel and President Trump. Things are about to get very complicated …
I listened to the audio book and the narrator was different from the first book. The fact that he voiced the old man in a very “throaty” voice was a bit annoying to me. His vocal interpretations of anyone in the book from the Koreas was very stereotypical sounding, while his Donald Trump was even more over the top than the real Trump.
I had hoped for a bit more adventure based on the synopsis, and to a degree there was some travel, but there was so much politics that I never really felt that I understood it all. As a matter of fact, when the book was over, I still wondered if that was the conclusion or if I was missing something.
All in all – a disappointing sequel that was best left unwritten. 2 out of 5 stars.
Various Ramblings of a Nostalgic Italian 
Sequels hardly ever live up to the original…there are some but far and few in between
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Doesn’t sound great. To echo you & Max, sequels rarely match originals. I think only exceptions are ones where the author went in to it at the beginning with the idea ‘this is going to be (say) a 3 book story’ and writes it that way. Most seem like, here’s the story, it’s a book, then…oh! Surprise! It sold a million copies!! Now the publisher wants another! How can I add on to this already completed tale?
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