Review: Better than average self-published novel
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 23, 2013
I mostly enjoyed the book Exodus: Empires at War Book 2. There's plenty of action and the story moves nicely. I'll buy the next installment in the series. It's pretty easy to tell that this book hasn't seen professional editing. I ran into several typos, and I'm not a good proofreader. I also think that a content editor would have had something to say about Mr. Dandridge's use of long names. The bad guy aliens have very long and difficult to pronounce names, but even the humans sport names that are long and odd enough to interrupt the flow of the story. It must have been fun pulling out the improbable appellations, but they don't make reading flow easily.The Dandrige obviously has read David Webber. The main story thread extrapolates on Weber's Safehold series premise of humans running to establish and empire after Earth and some colonies have been wiped out, then facing the evil aliens thousands of years later. Weber's battle descriptions, especially the counts of missals fired, intercepted, missing the target and hitting the targets are straight out of Weber's Honorverse. There's even a starship captain with a cat she calls Stinker. These honors to a well established writer are fine, but obvious. My guess is that the author has also assimilated some John Ringo invasion novels, too. This isn't all bad news, but noticeable. That's not to say that the book is totally derivative. There is some interesting use of worm holes and black holes.As to deep characters, there really aren't any. Shifting among multiple viewpoints can move the story along but doesn't offer time to develop characters much beyond simple game pieces. And, we get little idea what many characters look like. Physical descriptions are minimal, but we do get some large astronomical numbers and incredible spaceship speeds thrown in to wow us. Again, the writing isn't enough to keep me from reading, but I would only recommend this author for a quick, light read.