A review by nakedsushi
The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

5.0

I started reading this book because I wanted to read an action-filled science fiction book written by a woman, not knowing what this was really about, so it was a wonderful surprise. Yes, it has action, gore, lots of explosions, and all the science fiction elements I like, but it's also about eerie endgame capitalism and what it does to society, which is what brought this up to a five star book for me. The social commentary about corps and what they were up to was just shy of being heavy handed, which worked in this case.

I sort of got spoiled on the book when I was looking at what other Goodreads readers tagged this book as, so if you don't want to accidentally find out about a major plot point of the book, don't look there! I typically don't like that type of plot point because it's rarely done well, but in this case, it was done *really* well.

I might have missed something in the beginning, but I liked that the gender of our main character was kind of a mystery for most of the book and a non-issue.

Spoilers below:

Spoiler

The book has some surface similarities to All You Need is Kill / Edge of Tomorrow, but has more world-building around it. I especially like the feeling after reading the book that one could go back and read from the beginning and get a better understanding of just what was going on.