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This must be how straight men feel when they accidentally stumble into a gay bar: just a confusing sense of growing unease culminating in a realization of, "oh, I don't belong here and this isn't for me."

I'll admit up front that this was a blind airport purchase and I did not realize this was the seventh book in a series going into it. And it's not meant to be a standalone; there are tons of references to events and now-deceased characters from previous entries that I knew were going over my head. Throwaway lines like, "just like that time in Israel!" meant nothing to me because I just got here, but I'm sure all the callbacks landed for longtime fans.

The premise of a clandestine plan for China to make a move on invading Taiwan depending on the result of a 2024 U.S. Presidential election intrigued me, and the more I read the more I was almost having fun trying to figure out what was fiction and what wasn't. October 7th, the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, COVID, Tiktok, and Elon Musk are directly referenced, but as far as I can tell the point of divergence with respect to the presidency was after Carter? I've never read a piece of contemporary fiction that skirted this close to real events.

Unfortunately this book suffered from the existence of a central protagonist that counteracted any enjoyment I could've experienced while reading it and I genuinely believe this would've been a more compelling narrative if he just wasn't in it. I came for the backroom politicking and international negotiations and double-crossing while rogue submarine commanders threaten to let the genie of nuclear war out of the bottle. Instead I got a comically unstoppable Mary Sue of a former SEAL with survivor's guilt who occasionally hallucinates his fridged wife and daughter (spoiler for previous books in this series I guess) encouraging him to keep killing and surviving.

To say nothing of the way the author can't go more than a few paragraphs without tripping over his dick to score some ham-fisted culture war dig. There are multiple references to how awful and dangerous big cities and San Francisco specifically have become, an extended circlejerk over how great Ayn Rand was, Wall Street executives who engage in ESG initiatives are literally called communists, and the Chinese antagonists (you know, the actual communists) point to DEI programs in the US military for the reason why the PLA will win any hypothetical future war. The way contemporary political issues are addressed in this book read like how someone on the far left would mock someone on the far right; I genuinely thought I was reading poorly-crafted parody at points.

There's clearly references to older and more famous military thrillers and espionage novels and I could tell the author had done a ton of meticulous research. I just wish I got more of the geopolitics the marketing blurb on the back cover promised and less hyper-masculine power fantasy.

There's a certain irony around reading a book like this shortly before I make a transatlantic flight. Yeah I'm vegetarian, I own an EV, and recycle etc. etc., but I also know that a single long haul trip can completely offset the carbon emissions I'd otherwise save, which doesn't even account for the inevitable flight back.

What I appreciate here is that this book doesn't browbeat you into being a Luddite through guilt tripping (though it does mention and discuss other individuals and organizations that try to). Instead, it does acknowledge the necessities and positives of air travel and how it's made the world more connected and accessible. But that doesn't mean it's not without cost.

So is anyone doing anything about it? Turns out, yes, but the technology isn't there yet, and barring some unforeseeable breakthrough, it might never get there on the scale needed. There's specific foci on SAF (sustainable air fuel), biofuels, hydrogen gas, and electric battery-powered aircraft, as well as which firms and individuals are putting the most work into realizing these alternatives, and their unique shortcomings. And it turns out there are a lot of shortcomings, and it doesn't seem like anything is going to change about it anytime soon.

Are we doomed? Probably, especially considering the post-COVID projections for "revenge travel" (this book came out in 2022, and it seems that has played out exactly as forecast), as well as a growing middle-class in China which is supercharging a domestic air industry to rival those in "mature" economies. But this book tries not to make it seem like a downer and highlights that some people are trying to do something about it.

This is the most conflicted I've felt over a book in a long while: the good bits were really good, and the bad bits were really bad. But I guess if we're measuring success on the metric of "made the reader feel opinionated about the work," this was a A+.

This book was written in English, but by an author who does not speak English as a native language and it shows. I'm not saying this was originally in some other tongue and was then translated into English, I mean someone wrote an entire book in a language they learned later in life. Which is super commendable! And damned if the Dutch don't have flawless English (at least all the ones I met when I was in the Netherlands, where I bought this book). But that does result in some tells and oddities that stuck out to me. Every instance of "second" was instead rendered as "sec", even outside of dialogue tags. Ditto for "diff" instead of "difference", "cuz" instead of "because", "coupla" instead of "couple of", etc. It's just not a way real people speak in my experience, let alone write prose.

While the syntax may have been distracting, the underlying themes had me in a choke hold. Vanity and the loss of physical beauty (especially in the context of super-vain parts of the gay community) is not something I recall ever seeing explored in other recent media I've come across. And setting that aside for the direct horror content, this was one of the most unique haunting/possession stories I've ever read because the source of the supernatural elements was something I never even considered to be a possibility in fiction - until now.

But you only get to all that if you manage to get past the worst opening chapter I've ever read; I almost quit this book in the first ten pages (like I did with Hex, another book by this same author...). It was super confusing to come out of the gate with a scene from the story's climax before I know any of the characters or what the hell I'm even supposed to be afraid of.

But then again this book had one of the creepiest horror scenes I've read in a long while (medical/hospital horror is a whole other level of fucked up). But then again, there are a lot of references to other, more famous works of horror fiction that feel ham-fisted and in your face. But then again, the gay representation was done really well. But then again...

I'm just gonna cut my losses here and split this one down the middle.

Kind of feels unfair to attempt to review this one because I don't feel like I read a book so much as the first third of a book. And it just so happens that this is the first in a trilogy. Go figure.

This was a book club read for when the genre wheel landed on "romance," which feels like a swing and a miss for me in that department because the central relationship here isn't given enough room or time to develop (an arc that almost definitely gets fleshed out in the subsequent books I'm assuming). But if you go into it instead expecting a science fiction environmental/survival heist story set on a hostile planet... it's actually pretty decent! Doubly so if you're like me and enjoy female leads like Ada who are allowed to and not afraid to make mistakes and just be kind of an overall chaotic mess: Not someone you'd wanna be friends with in real life, but definitely someone you'd love to keep tabs on from a distance.

Beyond that, it's a super short book and ends on an obvious cliffhanger, but you'd probably get a lot more out of it if you commit to the entire series (which comes in at a total 496 pages by my count). Maybe I'll get around to it someday.

You know what? Kudos to this book for actually saying something with its full chest. I frequently come across political books that read like, "everything sucks and here's why," but this goes a step further with tangible and direct suggestions for what to do about it; it really is a guide of sorts.

Of course there's the standard solutions like ranked-choice voting and campaign finance reform, but this also discussed a concept of "citizen deliberation" (think of a souped-up round of jury duty except the results get pushed to a public election as a referendum question) that I'd never even heard of before. It even laid out real-world examples of how these have operated in the (then) recent past. There's also discussions on how to tweak recall election rules to better hold politicians accountable in between elections, and just an overall grab bag of specific things that foreign countries do.

The book reads as a little dated now because it was published in 2014 when the Greek austerity programs and the Eurozone crisis was the big news of the day. I did find it curious that even in a pre-Brexit/pre-Trump society the general attitude was described as "literally everyone from the far left to the far right hates establishment politicians". I guess the more things change the more they stay the same. But this is still definitely a book worth checking out if you come across it though.