Dave McCreery

This book has an amazing start: the prologue sets up the book's conflict, delivers a lot of action, and really got me hooked into needing to know what happened. This intro, plus the great cover, meant I had high hopes for this book. And overall I did enjoy it! Be warned going in, though: as with many books with a war theme, this one has a lot of training in the middle, and that part can get tedious if you aren't connected with the characters. (More on that later.) For me, it meant a kick-ass prologue for an opener, some interesting first several chapters, and then a lot of sit-around-and-wait while the characters trained until actual fighting began. Once the action picked back up in the last 1/3 or so of the book I was hooked again.

There were two main things that got in the way of my enjoyment of this book. The first one was more of an annoyance, and I feel silly for mentioning it... but the continual use of the word “coo” bugged me. It seemed to be a catch-all swear word, and I was never able to figure out if it has a direct translation in our modern slang, or if it’s just there to avoid using swear words.

The second thing that I disliked was personal preference: for the majority of the book, I really didn't like main character Ryan Fall. It felt a bit like if you put all of Tom Cruise's action movie characters into a blender and removed the sex scenes, you'd get Ryan Fall. (And I don't like Tom Cruise's characters much.) Ryan is a hotshot underage sim-bike racer, who would rather cut class to go illegally race—and then crash—instead of going to school. He bucks authority, assumes his newbie opinion is better than seasoned and trained mech pilots, and I just did not vibe with him at all. I'm sure there are plenty of other readers who will love his cocky attitude; I personally did not, so I was very relieved when about 2/3rds of the way through the book he finally started to grow up. (The timing makes sense both book-plot and series-plot wise. It was the right time for this character growth... but it took long enough that I was starting to fear it wouldn't happen.)

The book's conclusion does bring some very nice character growth for Ryan, though there is still plenty of growth and learning left for the rest of the series. It does end on a bit of a cliffhanger—well, technically it's two cliffhangers, one in the final chapter and one in the epilogue. The ending of the final chapter made sense; at this point the book's plot threats have been handled and our characters are looking ahead to the rest of the series. The epilogue confused me a bit, though; as far as we are told, none of the characters in it are ones we have met before, and it seemed there just to ramp up anxiety about the series plot point. I'm curious how it will tie in to the second book, but it could have been left off without losing anything in the book's plot.

All told, this is a fun, fast-paced book, perfectly suited to fans of military space fiction.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

I read this book as part of the judging process for the 3rd Self Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC3), and while I was provided a review copy for judging purposes I read the book using the version available on Kindle Unlimited. My opinions are my own and do not reflect the thoughts of my SPSFC3 team or the competition as a whole.… (mais)