Review: Needs A Lot of Work
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 09 28, 2011
I got through about 1/3 of this book and finally gave up.  Here's why:When I read a book, I look for good writing, a good story, and good character development.  If it's Military Science Fiction, I also look for an understanding of science and an understanding of military matters.  So let's take them in reverse order:Military Understanding Grade: A.  The author clearly has prior military service/association and his descriptions of the military aspects of events and characters was well done.Science Understanding Grade:  D.  From unbelievable physics to simply a lack of an appreciation for scale, the book wasn't sufficiently believable to allow me to "suspend my disbelief" and enjoy the story.  As one example, the author simply doesn't seem to appreciate the sheer size of the galaxy.  At one point the main character's ship goes "on patrol".  They are patrolling an entire quadrant of space; a border with aliens that must be at least hundreds of light years in size, using detection devices not much better than exist today.  To make it worse, in their patrol of this space that consists of trillions upon trillions of cubic kilometers, they just happen to arrive within a few hundred kilometers of a location where an enemy ship is lurking and spot it with their limited means.  Of course, more bad guys arrive and just happen to pass within 2000 meters of the main character's ship! The disconnect is jarring.Good Character Development Grade:  C.  The characters are simply flat or unbelievable.  Not much more I can say about it.Good Story Grade:  D.  The story was uninspired and seemed to go nowhere.  More than anything, this facet of the book caused me to quit reading.  I was simply bored.  Maybe if I could have stuck it out beyond 1/3 of the book it might have gotten better.  But then I would have succumbed to the bad writing.Good Writing Grade:  F.  Overall, the writing was juvenile.  The dialogue, in particular, was bad.  The writer seems to not know that such things as commas, semi-colons, independent and dependent clauses, etc exist.  Every single sentence is a short declarative or descriptive statement delivered without any nuance or passion.  Even the main character's love life consists of him meeting a lovely woman and engaging in declarative statements about her looks followed by "dialogue" that consists of each character simply stating that neither wants a committed relationship followed shortly thereafter with sex.  Don't worry, the sex isn't really described.  Thankfully, because I can't even imagine how the author would express sexual matters in his short and dispassionate 5-10 word sentences.So my advice to you:  skip this one or at least read the 10% Kindle preview.