I've heard a lot of good things about Christian Kallias' books and the universe he's created, so I was looking forward to reading this book. Unfortunately, I was really disappointed. The dialogue is, to be blunt, just bad. It's heavy with exposition that is inconsistent with character relationships (old friends say things like, "As you know from when we did that thing all those years ago") and there are a lot of bad one-liners that felt like they were meant to sound dramatic but fell flat or sounded silly. There are also a number of unrealistic scenes in the narrative (the protagonist's reckless flying is directly responsible for the deaths of several of his squadron pilots and it's only ever casually mentioned, the protagonist pulls a gun on a superior to compel action and suffers no consequences except for a little light chastising from the superior, etc.) that took me out of the story because they were such unrealistic responses to the gravity of the scenes. The worldbuilding was good and I'm interested in the universe the author is constructing so I will probably check out at least one other book... but this one I just couldn't get into.

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Created Feb 27, 2019 at 2:15pm • Submit your own review...