Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

It's never fun to trash someone's work, but this book, when judged against others in its genre, is just unbelievably bad. The first major issue is that the author is utterly clueless about the military other than what appears to be a perspective gained from bad made-for-TV movies. This is a problem when the story centers around the U.S. military. This is really just laziness since even if you don't have personal experience the information is available on the internet and in books. Things like rank structure, makeup of units, and the naming convention of naval ships needs to be accurate if you're using contemporary, existing entities. The second flaw is complete lack of consistency. The main character was said to be commanding ships, then was a SEAL. The captain is awoken at 0400 and then the sun is coming up. Traveler is referred to as Trailer. The 8 year old talks like a 30 year old adult and then can't pronounce "habitat" within the same conversation. The ship is nearly two football fields long but they sneak it into an aircraft hangar that couldn't possibly contain it. They shift to the courtyard of the Pentagon to "land" despite the fact that the courtyard has obstacles that make landing impossible. The book is loaded with examples like this that snap the reader out of the story time and time again. So the military part of this book was completely sub-par... and so, unfortunately, was the scifi part, what little there was. There were a few aliens that weren't all that alien. The purple hottie somehow talked like an American teenager and the bipedal rhinos were suitably cliche with names that a 7 year old would make up. The story (such as it was) relied entirely on the deus ex machina of hyper learning and phase shifting to solve every problem with no real struggle for the characters. A lot was so glossed over it stretched suspension of disbelief to its breaking point. The plot itself was thin, predictable, and dull. The dialogue was cringe-worthy most of the time and the characters had all the dimensionality of a piece of blank paper. The author uses another well-worn cliche by making his human-in-space a Navy SEAL, but then doesn't bother to learn anything about the SEALs and how they operate. They don't fly fighters, they don't command ships, and they don't forget the last names of people on their teams. (etc, etc) The action is bizarrely paced in such a way that there's no drama. The captain, in the middle of alien fleets closing in and fighting ships on the surface, goes to his quarters to get his clothes so his ex-wife can be more comfortable. Throw in a ton of punctuation and capitalization errors for good measure. Then there's the biggest problem of all... this isn't really a novel since it has no ending. There's a difference between a cliffhanger and when someone hits their wordcount and just stops writing. This book has the latter. Since conflicts introduced weren't resolved this makes it a collection of disjointed scenes with no payoff for actually sticking through with it to the end. If this book was listed as a YA novel (which would make more sense as I suspect the author might actually be a teenager given the writing style) it would be OK... but as a military sci-fi novel it just doesn't stack up. Glad I only borrowed this book as it was a weak story, poorly written, with mediocre editing.