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The Glory of the Empress (Admiral Book 3) by Sean Danker.

This is one of those rare times that I wish I had DNFed a book, though it's not the book's fault at all.

Set in the distant future, two galactic empires are at war with each other. One empire picks 12 people out to crew a new kind of war spaceship.

After reading the first sentence of the first page, I said out loud, "Wow this author can really write!". I had thought I would love it, but turns out this wasn't the book I thought it was. I thought it was a science fiction book, but it's military science fiction.

Military means that the point of the book was battle, action, and tactics. The whole story was like watching an action movie while high on amphetamines. Frantic, breathless, and nonstop. Action, battle, action, action, characters talking about tactics, battle, action, fighting, and more battles.

What was missing was even the slightest detail of characterization. There were 12 characters on the ship. The book was 350+ pages long, and by the end of the story I couldn't tell you even just the gender of 9 of those 12 characters.

Each character was introduced (in dialogue) in the beginning of the story with full name and rank. Beyond that all we got was a description of hair for two of them, height on a couple, age on two. That's all the characterization. No backstory on any of them, only two even showed any personality at all.

It's really hard to care about a story when the characters are completely interchangeable. Again though, this isn't an issue with the book or with the author, this is military scifi, action and tactics and battles are what count.

I read (and loved) book #1 in 2018, so I got the next two books once I was done. Book #2 I DNFed in the same year; I should have deleted book 3 at that time, but I guessed I missed it.

Like I said, Sean Danker can really write! Unfortunately this book series and the couple other books he's written just don't look like a good match for me. If you like military scifi though, you should check this book out for sure!

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