This is somewhat a follow on to my review of the previous book in this series (see “Surprisingly Enjoyable”). As I indicated there, I am generally not a fan of the MPreg genre, but found the SciFi aspect interesting enough to check it out. I was eagerly awaiting this latest entry into the saga, hoping for the best but dreading that it might go south. I found this latest entry a little disappointing in that it spent way too much time on the “internals” of the various characters at the expense of the story. In my opinion, the story is paramount, the “feelings” of the characters give it depth, but only to a limited extent, one should not dwell on them obsessively.
I found Carter’s whining to be very grating and tiresome after a while and the internal dialogs of most of the other characters very homogenous (i.e., they all were expressing the same doubts, fears, insecurities, misunderstandings). I often found myself having to concentrate on which one was currently “speaking”. Mr. Leslie’s voice differentiation helped, but I still kept questioning who was the speaker too many times. The sub-plot with the General made no sense to me and was never foreshadowed to the listener, so it had all the appearance of coming out of the blue. The old Scout’s relationship insecurities were more that of a younger person and not a seasoned veteran, he was blind to too many things.
This is probably going to be the last book in this series that I will get as what I feared in my earlier review came to pass (see that review for details). It is somewhat a spoiler so I will not outline it here. Thankfully it took place only in the last 20 minutes of this book though. All I will say about that is that I am disappointed that Ms. Glass took that turn as I think that she could have gone quite far and made the series even more interesting by not going there. I will give her credit though for making it at least plausible within the framework of the universe she created, if still a little hard to swallow.
As a final note, to Ms. Glass. Please keep the overall story at the forefront. You need to explore more of the Bugs nature as what you have reveled so far shows them as smart enough to get all their tech and dominate races, but way too dumb to have survived this long. You are hinting at something potentially larger, but I may be reading too much into that last 20 mins. Basically, get the STORY moving. 😉