A review by thefourthvine
Wolf Star by R.M. Meluch
4.0
Whyyyyyyyyy is this series so addictive? I read the first one and immediately ordered two more and twitched until they arrived. Then I got one on my Kindle, because I could not stand to wait for an order to arrive. I read each one over the course of a single day, at the fastest possible pace, reading while doing things like changing diapers and failing to sleep. And this book is good, and the series is good, but it's not, you know. That good. I don't understand it at all.
Okay, I partly understand it: Meluch knows pacing and action. If you make it to page 40 in one of these books, you're probably going to keep reading until the end, even if you don't like it. (Her Amazon reviews have a lot of bewildered people going, "I didn't like it. I mean, I read it very quickly and couldn't put it down, but...")
But the thing is - lots of writers have a great sense of pacing and write fabulous action sequences. Many of them write things I prefer to military SF (and especially to military SF like this; in the even-numbered entries in this series, the US and Rome are fighting each other, and I like both sides and don't want them to fight). But still. This series was crack for me. I could not stop reading. I couldn't even stop rooting for the US, even though I liked Rome, thought they were mostly in the right on the original cause of the war, and didn't want the two groups fighting.
For me, this is probably the weakest book of the series, largely because it doesn't contain much of Augustus, who is my favorite character by far. But "weak" in this case still translates to "OMG addictive," so it's the kind of weak that's, you know, still pretty strong.
I can't say who I would recommend this book to - I wouldn't have recommended it to myself, after all, but I loved the series - but I will say that anyone who picks it up should probably have some free time blocked out for reading. Just in case.
Okay, I partly understand it: Meluch knows pacing and action. If you make it to page 40 in one of these books, you're probably going to keep reading until the end, even if you don't like it. (Her Amazon reviews have a lot of bewildered people going, "I didn't like it. I mean, I read it very quickly and couldn't put it down, but...")
But the thing is - lots of writers have a great sense of pacing and write fabulous action sequences. Many of them write things I prefer to military SF (and especially to military SF like this; in the even-numbered entries in this series, the US and Rome are fighting each other, and I like both sides and don't want them to fight). But still. This series was crack for me. I could not stop reading. I couldn't even stop rooting for the US, even though I liked Rome, thought they were mostly in the right on the original cause of the war, and didn't want the two groups fighting.
For me, this is probably the weakest book of the series, largely because it doesn't contain much of Augustus, who is my favorite character by far. But "weak" in this case still translates to "OMG addictive," so it's the kind of weak that's, you know, still pretty strong.
I can't say who I would recommend this book to - I wouldn't have recommended it to myself, after all, but I loved the series - but I will say that anyone who picks it up should probably have some free time blocked out for reading. Just in case.