Terms of Enlistment

[b:Terms of Enlistment 17619479 Terms of Enlistment Marko Kloos https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1365637085s/17619479.jpg 24585130] is good military science fiction. Period. The writing style is solid and held my attention all the way through.It has a lot of the standard military trope characters: for example, the tough as nails Sargent, the clueless self aggrandizing staffer, the hard but fair commander. Those tropes exist because they reflect a good deal of real life, and Kloos uses them well to push his story forward. He also does some unexpected things with them. (You'll have to read to find out.)The basic story is common enough. A young person joins the military, matures, faces dangers, and has adventures. The main character in this case is a young man, Andrew Grayson, who at the start of the story lives in a nasty welfare slum area of a dystopian future Boston. He joins the military as a way out of his dead-end existence. This isn't as easy as it sounds. Many apply and few pass the tests. The story then follows Andrew through training, duty assignment, and his blooding as a soldier.About half-way through the story takes a sharp and unexpected (to me) turn and goes somewhere else. What I thought was going to be an exploration of the dystopian future Earth turns into a alien encounter war story. (Marko Kloos makes it work, but I have to wonder about that other story that he almost wrote.)The writing is crisp, the characterization is strong, and there is plenty of action. If you like Elizabeth Moon's military SF or Tanya Huff's Valor series, you will probably like this.