Review: Good Read
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 7, 2012
This was a very enjoyable book.  For those who like military science fiction with a bit of space opera thrown in, this book will be tailor made for you.  If you like David Weber's Honor Harrington series, you will like this book (but more on that later).The story is about a fairly junior space fighter pilot and her rise through the ranks during her space-nation's long war with marauding space barbarians (who it turns out are really .  What makes the story interesting is that the main character is a member of a space nation that is 98% women.  They are a female dominated culture because they were forced to settle their world in a highly radioactive nebula with the consequence that in order to survive they had to manipulate the genetic code.  This genetic manipulation enabled the colonists to survive but with the side effect that live births of males became rare. This is a good "hook" for the story and the author tells it well.  The story moves briskly, the characters are well developed, and the space combat believable and interesting.Now the book does have a couple of problems:-- The first "problem" is the obvious derivative nature of the plot/story.  I said that if one likes the Honor Harrington series one would like this book.  That's because much of the story in this book is a clone of several Honor Harrington books.  An isolated space nation is discovered by a larger empire, a space nation with a culture completely foreign to the space empire, and a space nation whose alliance with that empire contributes more than one would think given the small space nation's size.  It's essentially the planet "Grayson" that is featured in most Honor Harrington books (the ideas I mentioned are not by any means the only similarities).  Now this is only a "problem" in the sense that it is there.  I didn't find it too troubling, it's far from being plagiarism, but purists out there might react differently.  As it is, the high quality of the story telling makes made it easy for me to ignore this issue.-- The second problem I had was the absence of sex.  The issue is this:  we have a society with 98% women, with the men hidden away and basically used a sperm donors, yet there is never any mention or even hint of how the women in this culture handle sex and romantic relationships.  Do they have sex with one another?  No indication they do.  Do they fall in love with one another?  No hint.  There would have to be some kind of cultural adjustment...but there is no mention of it.  Unless.  Unless the culture's skilled geneticists bred out sexual desire.  But there is no indication of that either, especially since the main character begins to be attracted to a male from a foreign space empire.  Now I do not want soft porn in my reading.  However, I found the believability of the entire book placed into question by the complete absence of any discussion of how this culture handles sex.Now those two "problems" are minor given the overall good story telling in the book.  Overall, I enjoyed the book very much and I intend to buy the sequel.