Review: 4.5 Stars
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 07 22, 2013
For me, this was pretty much a 5-star book...but that has much to do with its strengths playing to what I love in this genre. It has some notable weaknesses, however what was done well made it easy for me to ignore them (mostly).Strengths:1)Great bad guy aliens! Not "evil" because they don't grasp that concept, but very bad and very satisfying when they are killed.2) Nice mix of other alien races. The ones that we see interacted with are believable, interesting, and not overly anthropomorphic.3) Well written action sequences. Both in hand-to-hand and in space, the author has a knack for generating tension and getting me to read every word.4) Plot: its a big war, decades pass, yet events are tied together well and I felt very involved.5) Science (fiction): The author loves to detail the scientific rationales behind the gadgets in his universe.Weaknesses:1) While improved over the first book, there's still a good bit of extra material that an editor would have (rightly) chopped out. This material fell basically into two categories...it was either redundant, or it was overly pedantic. On the bright side, this was easy to spot and easy to skip past, so it didn't bother me.2) Dialog. Someone has to say it, perhaps other reviews have, but writing dialog is truly this author's Achilles' heal right now. If I were an author, perhaps I could offer some insightful advice or analysis, but I'm not. All I know is that the dialog is usually very ham handed and attempts at expressing humor never come across. I rather expect the author has a good sense of humor, but two books of old-woman smacking young-guy in the nuts is just painful...no pun intended.Some of the dialog is ok, but it always falls under two categories: "This is what I think..." and "This is what we're going to do..."But the type of interpersonal dialog that builds character and gives characters a unique voice is just not good. I imagine this is not easy to do...but learning to do it well (or better) would be so worthwhile. I have seen many authors struggle with this (often the ones who have a knack for it tend to fail badly at 1-4 of the above "Strengths"), but one thing I've seen that can help is using more "internal dialog" that show what/why a character is thinking/feeling.Anyway, if book 3 was out now I'd have already purchased it and would be reading instead of writing this review. Is there a mailing list to alert when it comes out?