Two chapters into River of Stars' second part, I'm feeling quite calmed. It could be that I simply didn't follow enough of the political goings on of the first part, or that the time jump that happened in the middle of it threw me for a loop, but the second part's big picture is clearer to me. That is, the second part's larger plot arc (which Kay is building up with several shorter ones, as he did in part one), is clearer to me than the first part's. In short, I'm pretty sure that Ren is planning to strike a blow for the peasants of the area.
Being able to see what's going on here has helped me to get over the shock of having the book's two main characters separated in this way. From what I'd read about the book before picking it up, I'd thought that Ren's and Lin's stories are tightly intertwined. This might be the case in the book's last section, or maybe this interconnection feeds into some larger reveal closer to the book's conclusion, but right now it still bothers me. Mostly because it forces one story to stop while the other catches up.
Actually, if Kay was trying to make the two characters' arcs seem like they were running temporally parallel, it seems like the goal is just too lofty. Both characters are from wildly different socio-economic classes, and, shy of some reference to the assassin that was sent to kill Lin, I can't come up with a tidy way for Kay to let the reader know that these two parts events are happening simultaneously. Currently the two feel worlds apart - and not in the same way Aomame and Tengo were in 1Q84.
I will say that leaving the time between Ren's joining the bandits and his becoming a respected member of their ranks unexplained is a good move. Whatever he experienced on the road to his present, seeing it come out in the way that Ren acts, reacts, and thinks is much more rewarding than being regaled with the tale of a swashbuckling young man fighting to gain the respect of his fellow bandits and the area's citizens.
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