A miserable protagonist in a miserable dystopian setting. This was marketed as "Hornblower in space," but it's not. Authors like Forester and O'Brian deal with the harsh discipline of the late 18th/early 19th Century British Navy because it's part of the historical setting, but they don't revel in it. They deliberately make their protagonists less severe outliers so that they only have to deal with the unpleasantness when it becomes useful to drive the plot.

Feintuch revels in the harsh discipline, making it one of the main focuses of his series, when he could have just as easily left it out since he's writing science fiction, not historical fiction.

I kept reading because I kept hoping it would turn into "Hornblower in space," but it did not. I stopped reading the series after this book. I'd like to say that I finally wised up and chose to stop reading it, but it's more likely that I didn't notice when the fifth volume came out. Either way, I'm glad I didn't read further.