Armada

So let me save you the time...this is basically a terrible, curse-laden, poorly-written version of Ender's Game. As is usual with these kinds of books, it moves along at a brisk pace, and the writing draws you in - I read most of the book in a single day. I was caught up in the story and wanted to find out what happened, but I got nothing else from the writing.

The book just starts - WHAM - and throws you into the action. This would be a great tactic, except the author failed to actually make me care about the situation or the characters, and so it just felt abrupt and jarring. The timing was off, the pace accelerated too fast.

Interestingly enough, the most poorly-written scenes in the book were the battle scenes. They were short, lifeless, and much more ‘tell' than ‘show'. You could almost feel the author's boredom coming through the writing - I wouldn't be surprised if they were his least favorite scenes to write.

Read this book if you like: - As many smart-aleck wink wink references to 80's pop culture as possible, no matter how tangential the storyline - Characters that didn't feel like real people. Emotional depth on the level of Hallmark Channel movies. Stilted dialogue - Plot holes Why couldn't they shut the drone launch tunnel security door and just destroy Zack's drone and the enemy ship? It would have resulted in the loss of a single unmanned drone.... - Amateur writing. It was repetitive: characters kept describing the situation they were in over and over, perhaps for dramatic effect. It was also not as tight as a book like, say, Ender's Game. Zack is described as having a temper, and we see him get in a fight at the beginning of the book, similar to Ender. However, Ender's anger is revealed to be something profound - he has just enough of it, in combination with deep care and love, which makes him the only possible candidate to fight the aliens. Zack's temper just makes him a dick to his dad and makes him want to shoot as many aliens as possible. Yuck - Unbridled, over the top cursing.

One thing I liked about this book: The ending was seriously cool. I'm not sure if it was original (probably not) but it was the only part of the book that really made me think.