The Collapsing Empire

This book was so, so very good.

My only complaint is the pacing- this is a short book. The author took nearly 100 pages to introduce the characters which was a bit boring. Fortunately, the characters themselves were interesting. Unfortunately, this took up nearly 1/3 of the entire book. I felt like this could have been a bit faster than it was.

Overall, this book is wonderful. The premise is extremely intriguing and I definitely intend the read the subsequent novels. In my opinion, this book really just established and set up the conflict that is to come in the next novels, so I think that they will be much more fast-paced and enjoyable. I was a little nervous going into this that it would be heavy on space physics, on which I know little about. This was not the case. This novel was easy to comprehend for a 17 year old high school student such as myself, which made me extremely happy.

I also adored the characters. They were all extremely unique and the author did a brilliant job of giving them each their own voice. If the names of the characters were removed from their chapters, I believe that I still would have easily known which chapter belonged to each character- that's how diverse their voices were.

The setting seems very fascinating and I believe it will only get even more fascinating as the books go on. I do wish there was a bit more character descriptions, as I felt like I had no idea what the characters looked like. They were merely described as attractive, moderately appealing, and ugly. It was a little bizarre.

The last 2/3 of this book make it very compelling. They make me extremely interested to read the next book in this trilogy (series?). I would definitely recommend this book to sci-if fans, and even people who are just looking to get into the genre- it's not super heavy on science stuff and doesn't give off the alien vibe that may deter some from the genre.