Rating: WARTY!
This was the start of a series (Pillars of Fire and Light) and again it exemplifies why I typically do not find series either compelling or fulfilling. I made it only 10% of the way into this - a 450-some pages tome - before I became completely bored. In the final analysis, volume one of a series is nothing more than a prolog. Thankfully this volume doesn't have an actual prologue. I don't do prologues. It does have an epilogue. I don't do those either.
The story begins with Indiana Beckham who, we're told, has had her lifelong goal tripped up when her entire team was banned from Olympic fencing because of one member's doping problem. But guess what, there are other competitions, and another Olympics four years hence. This woman, as she reminds us, is the best in the world, so I don't know what her problem is. If she hasn't won the Olympics, how is it she's considered the best? If she has, then she already won it once, and missing this year's isn't a life-ending issue!
But that's probably easier to get your mind around than why she's recruited for a clandestine super-soldier program, and even worse, why she accepts it, given that only one in 30 actually makes it unscathed through the genetic changes to the brain. It made no sense that anyone other than a complete psycho would go into this program, much less someone like her, who had so much to lose, and she had no motivation whatsoever to join these people from the part that I read. There went any suspension of disbelief for me.
So while that was left hanging out there, we were unceremoniously switched to a seemingly unrelated story of a navy jet fighter pilot who had just learned that she's failed to get into NASA's astronaut program. Instead of thinking maybe she could get into some other country's astronaut program, or even go back to being a kick-ass fighter pilot again, she is all depressed and presumably she gets dragged into this program too, but I had lost my interest in the entire story at that point, so I quit reading to move onto something which would do the job a reader pays a writer for: engrossment!
The story contained a lot of technical gibberish at one point. The author is an engineer, and while I am sure he's pleased with himself, the fact is that he overdid it because none of it made any sense to me, and I work with engineers! On the other hand, I was driving at the time, so maybe I wasn't paying as close attention as I ought, but I don't usually have problems following a story when I drive, so I can't believe I was that distracted! Anyway, it did not bring me in and I didn't like the story-telling, so I can't commend this based on what I read.
