Kat's Reviews > Woe to the Victor

The book begins with a bang and follows through on that promise. Awesome space battles that make sense, where you can picture the tactics and logic of battle progression. The plot has typical tropes, but they are well done. The beginning of the book with a pilot adrift in space, seemingly hopeless, pulls you in and makes you want to know why and if/how he gets out of his predicament. Cue overwhelming alien fleet with murky motives. Cue the last ditch defense of Earth. Cue humanity's last hope of survival as they flee Earth.

The plot progresses mostly similar to other books like this, but the details and characterization still kept me reading. The mixture of military sci-fi, hard sci-fi, and humanity's last hope were a nice combination. The author's background in aerospace engineering really comes through and adds much realism to physics involved. The characters were mostly well-done, though I did not find much sympathy with Lewis at first and the depiction of women, although better than many books of this type, still felt a bit stilted. The gendered language bugged me. But the cat… THE CAT! Yes, please. The alien civilization could have been better developed; motives, descriptions, etc left more questions than answers. I found myself not fully satisfied.

Overall, this book was worth the read and I look forward to more from this author.

I received this book for free for honest feedback from BookSirens.