Review: Good enough
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 05 12, 2014
This was a pretty decent story.  The heroine and nine others are offered a top notch military education in exchange for becoming hosts to a parasitic organism called a Riss.  The premise was interesting even if the symbiotic host concept was ripped off from Star Trek.  I thought the military environment was good too.  However, the constant abuse this woman and her fellow Riss hosts suffered was a little bit over the top.  The government clearly devoted a large amount of resources to getting this project off the ground, and it is difficult to accept that having made successful matches, the Riss and their hosts would be simply thrown out into the universe, without any supervision whatsoever, to be killed, maimed, raped, and generally left to the mercy of literally shiploads of people who hated them just because.  The extreme level of intolerance, even if believable, was readily apparent from the first moment of training and would surely have been addressed then.Also, the editing was pretty atrocious.  There were plenty of the common errors - missing words, improper conjugations, improper word usage in general.  Some of the poor word usage was stuff I had seen before: "compliment" instead of "complement," "personal" instead of "personnel," and so on.  As sometimes happens, one of the misuses made my top ten list of funny word screw ups.  Let me just say it's important to know the difference between a pariah and a piranha.  I laughed out loud when the heroine was being treated like a piranha.My last gripe is that the story read almost like a diary.  Events were described, and those events were interesting, but the story didn't really go anywhere.  Nothing was really resolved.  The ending was sort of what you might expect if you reached the end of volume one of a diary.  There was no cliffhanger.  The story just kind of stopped.  It was very strange.Don't get me wrong, this was an interesting read.  It just doesn't really leave me wanting more.  I would recommend the book, but you shouldn't go into it expecting it to be something that it is not.