While it was nice to fill in a couple of blanks from The Last Colony, this book really frustrated me. It suffered from the same arch-nerd tone that The Last Colony did, but I also found the voice of the teenage protagonist to be just totally not credible. I feel bad writing that, since Scalzi even addressed it in the afterword to the book and seems to have really tried to get it, but it just did not work for me. I just don't see a teenager lecturing the head of a 400-race galactic Conclave like she's the smartest kid in math class. The tone was just all wrong. To be fair, I read the whole thing, but I swear I don't know why.

Also, I read a criticism of Scalzi about his tendency to have his characters talk about some action that happened, rather than just giving us the action, and it was so spot on. So frustrating.