Now that the Neanderthals could open a portal between their Earth and ours, the inevitable question is should they reopen it?  And should they keep it open?  How will humanity on this side of the portal react?  What's to be gained?  What's to be lost?

Book 2 in the Neanderthal Parallax trilogy, Humans by Robert J. Sawyer, picks up shortly after the first book ended.  It hooks us right away with Ponter talking to his shrink and revealing he committed a crime while on our Earth.  What?  What?  Interesting!

This book spends a lot of time discussing the hypocrisy of american culture that espouses peace but constantly wars with other nations, and how religion is used to escape the guilt.  It's an interesting examination through the eyes of a race that abhors war and cannot seek forgiveness from their god.

The author does a good job of resolving any outstanding questions you might have from the first book here in the second book, and gives us a glimpse of Neanderthal culture through the eyes of a Homo Sapien Sapien.  As an aside, Sawyer describes at the start of book 1 some of the scientific classification of humans, including the pronunciation of Neanderthal or Neandertal, and why we double up Sapien in our own classification.  It's because there is debate whether Neaderthals should be Homo Neanderthalis or Homo Sapien Neanderthalis.  However, these books were published almost a decade before studies showed interbreeding had occurred between Neanderthals and our ancestors.

The Good: Great story telling.  Poses interesting real life questions for the reader.
The Bad: Although the story concludes, it doesn't wrap up as completely as the first novel (in other words, the outstanding questions are bigger than the answers we've received)
The Ugly: Nothing comes to mind

This is a worthy sequel, but is most definitely a sequel.  I wouldn't recommend starting with this book since it really does depend on reading Hominids first.  And if you do read Hominids, you won't be able to resist reading part two!