Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I am not giving this one-star review lightly. When I saw the boxed set has a 4.5 star average, it made me pause. I checked to make sure I was reviewing the right book. I read the four- and five-star reviews to make sure I wasn't missing something, to see if perhaps the series began slowly but got better as it went. In the end, I'm sticking to my guns: one star. Here's what I didn't like: - It's first-person and present tense. It's really, really hard to write a compelling space opera when you can't switch character POVs - and there's also no dramatic tension because you know the narrator has to survive! - There's very little world-building. An eight-book series could have spent some more time orienting the reader and giving background in what it means to live in a Gray-occupied world. - That's a symptom of a greater truth: the whole thing felt way, way rushed. The author hurried everybody into space extremely quickly. If he wanted the series to start in space, he should have just started it in space. - There are a LOT of one-sentence paragraphs. This may be stylistic, reflecting the way people form thoughts, but it's not proper for writing, in which a paragraph is supposed to be three to five sentences. - Because of that, the book is too stream-of-consciousness. Thoughts are presented in the manner they would have occurred to the narrator, not in a way that's designed to convey useful information to the reader. I could go on, but I believe I've demonstrated a number of serious structural problems with the book and the way it's written. It's not my intention to slag off the author, who obviously invested a lot of time and effort into producing a typo-free eight-book series. (Indeed, he provides a link at the beginning where readers can submit to him any typos they find in the text, the first time I've ever seen such a feature.) However, I did feel the need to provide a counterpoint to all the positive reviews.