With a stellar cast and amazing imagery, this is a riveting bit of scifi.
With a story that is very structured in the action scenes, this book pulls you in and focuses your mind on the interplay between the strong characters and their seriously dangerous enemies.
If you enjoy space opera with plenty of violently played out action and well rounded and fiesty characters then this is the book for you.
There's a lot of courage with a sprinkling of foolishness on display during the fight scenes, plus unbelievable aliens jumping here, there, and everywhere in this book. In fact, the aliens were one of my favourite parts of this story! I think it must be difficult to write convincing and acceptable aliens. They make up such a large part of any scifi story that it's important to get them right, right from the beginning, because if they are not weird enough or freaky enough then the book can feel a little dull. But the aliens in this book were seriously cool and frighteningly, differently, bad a**ed critters! They were enough to make me realise that had I met them alone on a dark night then I would genuinely be scared out of my mind.
I lost myself in this story on quite a few occasions, which turned into me forgetting to wash the dishes after sunday lunch. And then the next meal I did the very same thing at supper time too shamefully! That's what getting engrossed does to you!
Having said that, it shows that the book has the right combination of stomach churning action, great dialogue, and brilliant worldbuilding to keep my eyes on the page and my head in the story!
I enjoyed this rather intense and riveting book for all the reasons you would expect as stated above but because of one more - pure escapism. This book lifted me up and whisked me away from my normal life, and took me on a wonderful space adventure.
Who would ever be unhappy with that? That's the whole point of reading, isn't it - to enjoy a bit of escapism?