Review: Compared to its competitors here just not very good; trite, imitative, and hokey.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 03 12, 2014
At best a 2.75, for its comic book like plot, characters, and action.** SPOILER ALERT**There are several roughly similar competing SF stories on Kindle, and I've read a lot of them.  Compared to its competitors I'd rate Healey's "Far From Home" series as just barely average. Many elements of the plot here echoed many other roughly similar plots.  I was particularly annoyed by the author using the same dumb plot element three different times i.e. when Captain King was called on to surrender or die and asked the bad guys for "time to consult her crew," on each of three different occasions the supposedly rabid, vicious bad guys gave her up to a half hour to "consult,"  absolutely necessary time which gave her and her crew the critical half hour or so they needed to repair their ship and enable it to fight/or to get their weapons ready to fire; you'd think that after the first time they were duped the baddies would learn.Then, there was the time the pretty one dimensional legendary Hero, ace fighter pilot "Hawk"--whose cowboy diction and exclamations of "Yuh," by the way,  were really annoying--asked an ally what his plan was to approach and raid an enemy stronghold, and the reply was, "we're going to sneak up on them" to which Hawk replied, "good plan." Then, there was the chief villain General Carn, who-- a la Darth Vader in "Star Wars"--wore a getup including a concealing helmet, had been forcibly remade into a cyborg, and carried a sword as his chief weapon, as did Hawk (I was fearing that at the climax the disguising helmet of villain "General Carn" would come off and we would discover him to have been Hawk's missing father but, fortunately, the author didn't go that route).Finally, in the end King was only able to win out over her evil opponents by using the "deus ex machina" of the all-powerful black "pyramids"--seeded on planets throughout the galaxies and time by some mysterious, all-powerful predecessor race that had "ascended" to become disembodied beings of pure energy --able to completely control time and space, which sent King and her key associates back in time and space to change history.I kept on reading, hoping that this series would get better, but it just never did.  All in all and despite some half way decent parts here and there, this series ended up lacking in any depth, and was trite, imitative, and hokey.