Sacrifice

Fierce Girls at War #18

by Mike Adams

“They say it's 200 feet straight down over a raging river and the slide across is over 900 feet across. I can't wait to go first! This will be so fun!"- Fuka Hayakawa, age 15, squad 3, Jacks Company, 2nd year student New Hope Academy, member of the 'Spider Monkeys' group of lead climbers."I was limping on a turned ankle and the aliens were kind enough to give me a ride. They hung me upside down on the side of one of their rhino-crocs. With all the blood flowing to my head I slept really well and I think I might be even smarter now!"-Lieutenant Hanna Smit, communications officer, Colonial Rangers, New Hope Colony, Netherlands. Captured by aliens when Winter Haven fell.Jacks Company and the 12 ex-captives were able to slip away undetected for the moment but a giant alien encampment lies directly in their way. Getting past it will be tricky. On the Cairo the stay behind group is ready to leave for their rendezvous with the Jacks. Another group of captives including Ciara Cassidy's friend Lieutenant Miranda Balestiere are headed for their fate at the hands of the aliens.

303 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 9, 2019

About the author

Born in Brooklyn and raised in Staten Island, NY. Mike has a BS in Business Admin from Wagner College and an MBA from SDSU. A retired US Navy Lieutenant Commander, Supply Corps (Logistics), a former small business owner, and part-time substitute teacher. he's visited 6 continents and 36 countries, speak Spanish, some German, a little Italian and a little less French. He currently lives in Chula Vista, CA with his wife Chris.

Reviews

[Gilbert Stack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adams shifts gears a little in this eighteenth novel in the series and spends about 70% of the book focusing on the efforts of Rick Cassidy and Molly Bennett to guide fifty high school girls and a dozen or so chaperones, plush the captives they rescued in the last book, through the wilderness to safety. Of course, the wilderness they are working their way through is overrun with about 30,000 aliens and all the normal dangerous creatures that inhabit the planet of New Hope. Then again, these high school girls have spent six months training as colonial rangers and they aren’t exactly helpless.

If you’ve been reading my reviews of the series, you’ll know that these novels are well balanced between action and the planning of the military campaign against the aliens. This one goes more on the action side and the tension increases accordingly. Add to that that the title of the book is called “Sacrifice” and you’ll spend each encounter wondering who’s going to make the ultimate sacrifice in the novel. Adams isn’t exactly George R. R. Martin killing off his whole cast in Games of Throne but he’s already taken out several of my favorite characters so I never feel that anyone is safe in these books. That willingness pays dividends here as we wonder which of these young soldiers is going to die.

To further increase the suspense, in the last book Cassidy and his soldiers rescued several humans captured by the aliens and a couple of them just cannot come to the grips with the reality that they are in the middle of the wilderness fighting for their lives. They want to control everything and to be pampered. They’ve already gotten several of their fellow captives killed and every time they came on screen I wondered what idiotic thing they would do to increase the danger to the rest of the group. It was an excellent device to make a bad situation even worse.

This novel also includes excellent sections in which the humans and aliens separately recognize how precarious there two situations are (with reinforcements coming to both sides) and lay their plans accordingly. The next books are likely to be even more exciting.

If you liked this review, you can find more at www.gilbertstack.com/reviews.