Sigh. I have been on a hunt for lady sci-fi writers. There’s Lois McMaster Bujold, of course, but I’ve already read (and reread, and rerereread) all of hers. Mostly, the women are in the fantasy section, and I wanted space! So I had high hopes for this one, and they were dashed – dashed, I tell you!
There’s a decades-long war going on with some aliens, and an internal coup going on in the military between factions who think the head dude is doing it wrong, and a kidnapped scientist, and the scientist’s runaway teen daughter, and some priests (???), and a planet with some nice aliens, and some handy teleporty wormholes, and some artifact doohickey, and lots of pages of what reads like somebody’s physics dissertation thrown in randomly to describe the doohickey. NONE of it is appealing, or enticing, or even interesting. There are too many good guys who never get really explained, too many bad guys who get even less backstory (human and alien both), and I never cared about any of them, or the fate of the universe.
This is apparently part of a series, so maybe I missed some of the backstory and explanations, but I don’t think any of that would have helped. The characters were blah, the conflict was overcomplicated, the ending was rushed, and sigh. My library is too small to have real sections, so all the genre stuff is mixed in and you just have to hunt for the little stickers, and I fear my lady-sci-fi quest will not be very successful under such trying circumstances. If anybody has any recommendations, I’ll take ‘em!