Rating: WARTY!
I'm sure this sounded like a great idea for a story when it first hit the author, but the idea far outstripped her execution of it. The so-called warrior wench, who does far more wenching than warring, is Vas, who manages to get herself drugged, and when she finally comes out of it, a month has gone by and her spacecraft has been parted out and sold. She sets off on a quest to get it back.
I started reading this, got about a third of the way through it, set it down to read some more pressing books where i had a deadline for reviewing them, and then when I finally got back to it, I couldn't recall a single thing about this novel at all. After a brief refresher, I began reading it again and found that this supposedly tough woman is just another wilting violet with hots for this new guy onboard. Why female authors do this to their characters is a mystery to me. Maybe there are readers who like this sort of thing, but I can't subscribe to it.
I have no objection to a love story if it's done right, but this young-adult horseshit featuring instadore makes no sense and is poor writing. It only gets worse from there because there are, apparently, "unmarked ships blowing apart entire planets and the Commonwealth government can't, or won't, stop them." Blowing up entire planets? This is what happens when an author has no clue about physics and specifically, here, the amount of energy required to actually blow up an entire planet.
To totally disintegrate Earth, for example, you'd need something like sixty quadrillion one megaton nuclear bombs - all strategically placed and exploding simultaneously. It's hard to cost out a single nuclear weapon, but a very rough estimate is two million US dollars. Multiply that by sixty quadrillion, and you see the problem. Who has that kind of money? Even if you had some other means of destruction, it would still cost to build the weapon, and to generate the requisite amount of energy to power it, so what would be the point of doing that? What would be the value of it to the ones doing it?
If the aim is merely to wipe out the population, then why not simply drop a virus?
So the whole foundation of this book was clueless to begin with and the romance really didn't help at all. I can't commend this based on what I managed to read of it.
