I really need to get a handle on the rapidly growing backlog of books to review, so I’m going to focus on books that I’ve read this year and catch up with the older ones as I go.
This book showed a lot of promise, and to be fair, it held my interest through to the end. It takes place in the far future, where humans have expanded to multiple star systems and technology has advanced to the point where everyone (or almost everyone) has zero-friction brain-to-computer interfaces, and super-high bandwidth networks that allow people to see and experience almost everything through anyone else’s eyes, so long as their privacy filters don’t block them. If you were to write a believable story where humanity evolves into a hive mind, this universe would be about midway between that and where we are now.
But on one of the frontier planets, a faction of religious fanatics has taken over the government, shut down all the networks, isolated themselves from the rest of the galaxy, and is doing everything they can to return humanity to a more natural state. Worse, though, they are throwing augmented humans and members of the resistance into brutal concentration camps, which is where this book begins. The main character is a fighter pilot in the galactic human fleet, but when she returns to her homeworld, she gets thrown into one of these concentration camps and has to break out. The whole story is about her trying to escape this nightmare, along with a band of friends that she meets along the way.
One of the things this book does well is to subvert expectations. For example, you would think that a government of fanatically religious fascists would be so evil, it would almost be a caricature of itself—and at times, it veers very close to that. But as the book progresses, you find out that they’re not exactly wrong. While the plot generally follows a linear progression, there were a couple of surprising twists that completely turned the main character’s perception of the situation on its head. There’s not much more I can say without giving spoilers, but I enjoyed that quite a lot.
However, by about the midway point, the writing began to feel a bit repetitive. Also, I never really bought into the love story, because the chemistry between the main character and her love interest was just way too over the top to be believable. I can appreciate that people tend to cling to each other in stressful situation, but something about the way the main character obsessed over this guy was just off.
Then again, that wasn’t the only other thing that was “off” about him, which was kind of the point of the book… except, it ended at the midway point without resolving any of the promises that were set up at the beginning. And that, by far, was the most frustrating thing. What is going on with the aliens? It’s obvious from the beginning that that’s why the religious fanatics are trying to destroy all the tech—and for similar reasons, it’s obvious from the beginning that the love interest is either an alien or possessed by aliens. And yet, we never find out exactly what’s going on with that. It’s like we only got half of a book.
I have no problem with authors who write long series where the first book is basically a hook to the rest of the series. But for that first book to feel satisfying enough that I want to read the rest of the series, it has to have an arc of its own, where the promises set up at the beginning are resolved. The hook has to lie in the way that the resolution of the first book changes things, not just stopping the book in the middle. It wasn’t even a cliffhanger, either! A cliffhanger would have actually been better!
So yeah, I’m giving this book three stars, not because it was “meh,” but because there was such a mixture of things I really liked and things that drove me crazy. In the end, it all averaged out in such a way that I’m not very likely to read the rest of the series. But perhaps your experience will be different, especially if you don’t mind unresolved endings like I do.