Review: Good Sci-Fi
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 12 16, 2012
There were some very positive things about this book that I truly enjoyed, there were also some thngs that kept it from getting a full 5 stars.The positives included GREAT charachter development, Barrett does a really good job here making you feel for the leads in the story and does a great job of skipping around to different charachters without losing focus on the overall story. The novel wasn't over-burdened with technical jargon and for once the enemy weren't stupid, mindless automatons rushing in mass waves while the humans catch every break, they do catch breaks but they were "believable" for a sci-fi story.A couple of negatives. The book does need a bit of editing, there were some grammatical errors and type-o's.  Also I'm a bit of a world building snob and the time-line is fuzzy and to be honest unbelievable.  From what I take aliens landed and within about a decade we were able to reverse engineer their ability for inter-stellar travel?  I don't think this is possible with the current understanding of physics.  Look at it this way, if you went back in time to say 1890 and gave a group of scientists a Kindle would they be able to replicate and build Kindles?  Of course not, it would help them to grasp the basic understanding of processors but building one when you barely have an understanding of electricity would be impossible.  Barret would have been better served putting the time-line about a century ahead of where it was and explaining we were on the cusp of the same tech and this just pushed us over that line.Other than these small details the over-all story was really good and I will enjoy reading the rest of the book and am excited to see where it goes