Reviews

Breach of Peace by Gary T. Stevens, Daniel Gibbs

princessleopard's review

3.0

I have mixed feelings about this novel. It's not bad by any means. It's competently written, respects the reader and its characters, and isn't overly difficult to follow - but it feels overly ambitious/bloated. There are too many POVs that don't really contribute anything to the story, and too much political/engineering exposition that drags down the pace of the story. Despite the novel being longer than average, not a whole lot happens in terms of plot. There's a few scuffles, a tinge of action, but by far the bulk of it is sitting in place watching characters interact. There are an awful lot of side characters, and they become jumbled together, to the point where I wouldn't have minded any of them dying, because I couldn't really keep track of who had which tragic backstory. I think the novel would have been much better served if it stayed with our main two characters, Miri and Jim, and explored the other characters through their eyes. I could maybe see having the despot character be a third POV, just to keep tabs on what's happening politically, but even that seems unnecessary for the most part, since we just see her doing vague totalitarian things - or, again, more exposition.

This novel is perfectly serviceable as a sci-fi story, but you're probably going to be skimming generous chunks of it just to get to the meat of the story itself.