Rating: 
Summary: Interesting plot but not as good as Fool's War
Review: This book was a good read, but I was disconcerted by the fact that Zettel would occasionally stop the action to describe what everyone was wearing in flowery and very descriptive terms. (She didn't say "She was wearing a blue tunic," but "a deep blue tunic with detailed trimming, blah blah blah."The characters' clothing didn't seem central to the plot (as in, for example, Memoirs of a Geisha). So frankly, I don't give a darn what they are wearing, I'd like to get back to the plot please. I preferred Zettel's second book, Fool's War, although this one still moved along quite nicely (aside from the clothing descriptions).
Rating: 
Summary: What Happens to a Writer When You Succeed
Review: This novel had at least five places it could have stopped. What's more, this novel wanders all over the place. Ok, Zettle went from unknown to famous. The publisher said, "You can have a hardbound if you give us so many pages." Then, god help us, we were saddled with this. Someone commented on the really pointless descriptions of clothing and so on. It's worse than that. The first person to actually believe anyone would be stupid enough to allow the takeover of one of the space stations gets a medal. The supposed moral dilemmas annoyed me by their shallowness. The "plague" annoyed me worse. We are shown a human society that is extremely advanced, technologically, and it can't solve the plague in five minutes? Zettel's hand-waving on that one irritated me beyond measure. The text was also sloppily proofed -- I actually extracted my red pencil and started ticking and fixing the errors. I can't believe a published author would allow the multiple cases of the wrong "its" to get through, or that a publisher would send it to press in that state, but they did. The biggest problem is, I actually liked both Reclamation and Fool's War. This novel should have been half the length it was, and better thought out. Yeah, I'm ticked. I paid hardback price for this, and I should have waited. I will never buy another book by Zettel in hardback.
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