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| Trade paperback, 356 pages Published 2019 Acquired April 2020 Read June 2020 |
At first, this felt like a very generic military sf novel along the lines of Starship Troopers, which I'm sure was by design. I wasn't super into it. But then all of a sudden something happens and the novel becomes very intense and very interesting. I don't want to say what exactly, but perhaps I can tell you it becomes Starship Troopers crossed with Slaughterhouse-Five. From there on, I really enjoyed it, as Hurley unravels some of the tropes of military sf in service of perhaps didactic but strongly convincing message: it's the kind of story where you don't mind a message because the author constructs the characters and the world so that the message feels real and natural. I did struggle a little bit with the large cast of secondary characters, and unfortunately it's often important to know who they all are to follow some of the twists and turns of the plot. But across the course of the book I went from reading into small chunks to reading one hundred pages in one go. This is my first fiction by Hurley; I must seek out more.
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