This book, for me, suffered from a real lack of tonal focus. It started strong, with the introduction of a likable protagonist, but due to tonal shifts and my own difficulty with keeping characters straight in my head (more on that later) I gradually lost interest.

My problem with the tone is that Scalzi couldn't pick a lane. The whiplash between witty banter and more serious science fiction didn’t allow me as a reader to settle into either groove, to the detriment of the book.

As for the other difficulty, I hesitate to even bring it up because it makes me sound old and angry. I’m not really either of those things and am really open-minded across the board. But the character names in this novel were very confusing. Most were so foreign sounding that my mind had trouble matching the pictures in my brain to the names on the page. None of the names had a face or me, and since so much of the book was groups of people working together and sparring verbally, it all started to run together for me. None of the side characters really had any character at all. I really hope this doesn’t sound crazy or racially motivated. It was a point of confusion for me, and the writing suffered for it in my eyes.

In fact, I don’t recall there being much, if any, character descriptions at all to help attach faces to names. So for me, the result of using difficult names and failing to provide some description of the characters was a story that didn’t allow me to connect much with anyone other than the main protagonist and antagonist. And the pilot. He was pretty cool.

I lost interest in this one, but I loved the idea. I didn’t hate it and I didn’t love it. A perfect 2.5 star book.