Review: Just Awesome
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 01 20, 2014
WARNING!!!! POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT!Overall, this was an excellent quick read that kept me reading and engaged. The characters are lovable and easy to relate to.It was somewhat predictable, for example, I knew how to fix a crucial problem the moment it occurred, but it also had some very nice twists and turns that made me smile at their execution and delivery... Hampering that, though, was how quickly things moved. I felt it could have been fleshed out a thousand times better.It has an excellent storyline and subplots that promise more to be told, both in the past and in the future. Frequently referenced is how Tori and Ethan met - I want to see more on this. How exactly did these two fall for each other? They're such an unusual pair, after all!Telling the story from first person was a nice twist from most sci-fi stories, which are usually told from an omniscient point of view.Mercs in space is an idea often mentioned in other sci-fi ventures and I can't say I've ever seen it be the main focus of a book... Especially not from the perspective of the mercenaries themselves. And it was fantastically done. I never once thought of any of the characters as less than human. Except Vye. She was a jerk and it was gratifying to see... Well, you'll have to see.As I said, I never once held anything against the characters... After all, this is a character that at one point agreed to kill hundreds of civilians to save his own hide... Yet I never once disliked him. In fact, I was rooting for him the entire time. Ryan did an amazing job making the character's personalities very real.It was, all told, fantastic. However... There are some serious nitpicks which need to be addressed.The jargon was unnecessarily confusing. In the writing world, this is a fantastic way to lose readership. While some authors are certainly prone to tapping out a thousand words per definition, it can easily be done in ten.Unnecessarily hard and confusing jargon sans explanation is something reserved for hardcore sci-fi... And this book doesn't fit that description. It's sci-fi, action, military and romance all rolled into one, and is very character centric. The sci-fi is just a backdrop. It needs more descriptions. This is an immersive world that I know nothing about. I want to be SHOWN everything. There's a great deal of TELLING in this book.It has multiple subplots that could please a lot of people, but it really just destroys the enjoyability of the narrative when they don't understand half the terms or later find that they incorrectly deduced the meaning of a term.A prime example of this is the use of the word Espatier and its initial introduction to the book: It's hard to understand without prior context because espatier isn't actually a word. It's a made up term used infrequently in the gaming industry by game developers for `space marines.' Hardly anybody is going to get the reference, given that this is, as far as I can see, the first use of this word here.One HUGE irk for me was that there aren't enough character markers in conversation. There are nearly entire pages worth of conversation with no animation breaks, no explanation of body language, facial twitches or even who is saying what! I don't think a single eyebrow was raised in this book. I recall no facial expressions softening. No chiseled furrows in any brows. Nothing to break conversational stretches, not even "_____," he said. "____." Sometimes characters will monologue and be broken into by another character without warning and without any explanation of who is saying what. In a conversation between four people, this can get very aggravating.We, as a reader, have to entirely rely upon our understanding of the character's speech and personality to discern who is saying what.Fortunately, this is more prominent in the beginning of the book and stops being so pesky as the writer gets into the swing of things.There is a disappointing lack of descriptions in this book. Hardly any physical description of characters are present. I know that Ethan is pale and scarred. I know Xiao is Chinese. The bar tender in Xanadu has a weird accent that's never explained. I know that Vladimir is Russian by name only and he's a huge motha. I know Tori is blonde. That's it. They've failed to become real entities with a face in my mind's eye. Again, we come back to lack of descriptions.This book could have been three times longer and still be just as enjoyable... More enjoyable, in fact, if only the author had explained things a little more.I would give this book five stars for an outstanding storyline, moving subplots and a lovely tale of two star-crossed lovers... And errors aside, it is an author's job to write a story, to be a storyteller... It is the sole job of an editor to catch errors. If there are errors in the story after their workup, then the shame lies with them alone. Authors put their trust and faith in them to make sure their book is complete. I lay no blame at the feet of the author.This was a fan-freaking-tastic story... And I award five hard earned stars. :)