Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsInteresting Premise
Reviewed in the United States on February 21, 2015
This book has me somewhat torn. On one hand, it had me reading until the end, wanting to find out what happened, and that is a good sign. On the other hand, there were many weak points about the book, some that rather bothered me.
I am not going to focus on the good here, because frankly, I can't put my finger on what was good. However, that does not mean the good doesn't exist. It certainly does. I just can't delineate the good points. I read the whole book, so I must have liked it.
On the bad points, they are easier to point out. I will note a few of them here.
First, the book is way too long. Long books are fine, but only if they didn't drag out. The entire section of when the protagonist is serving a week's punishment as an aux was frankly ridiculous and could have been eliminated, for example. All that scene did was to fortify the feeling that the Marine cadets were not in some sort of 20-year recruit training but in a fraternity where goofy hijinks were conducted. Yes, people died there, but still, the cadets let petty actions interfere with life and death.
That leads to another problem I had. A reasonable human perspective was non-existent. Life and death seemingly meant nothing to the characters as they acted in self destructive ways without regards to consequences. The author did offer up a reason for this, but I didn't buy it. They know the consequences of their actions, yet don't seem to care.
The entire "life is cheap" aspect of the book makes no sense. I can accept the Cull, which was the author's rendition of a Roman decimation, as a tool to induce better performance in training. However, beyond that, it makes no sense. It take 20 or more years to train a Marine. It takes 9 months to create a human (nothing was mentioned about this, so I would assume current biology still holds sway). Marines evidently fall like scythed wheat in battles for their masters, yet somehow, there are millions of Marines in cryogenic sleep and entire battalions and huge numbers of cadets are executed for inane reasons. The numbers just don't add up.
Finally, there is the protagonist, Arun. He is one of the most unlikable protagonists I have come across, but that could just be to give him room to develop. He is supposed to be a good tactician, but we never see it. He is a petulant whiny kid who is somehow in love with an older cadet who he doesn't even know, and he keeps discussing her with his squad despite them telling him to can it (later events concerning this were extremely far-fetched). He puts himself and his squadmates in danger for stupid and insignificant reasons. And just about everyone hates him for a silly event that is blown so out of proportion that it becomes a drag on the story. The other cadets' virulent hate for him is unreasonable and unrealistic.
There is quite a bit to like about the book. I read it through, and I might read the next on in the series. It could have been so much better, though. I would recommend it to those who like the Space Marine genre who might want to give it a shot.
