Terms of Enlistment

Review d'origine : Un très bon livre de SF militaire qui annonce du bon pour cette série. On a pas le temps de s'ennuyer et on finit presque par avoir de la peine pour ce pauvre Grayson contre qui le destin semble s'acharner.

Relecture : Rien à redire de plus par rapport à la dernière fois. J'apprécie toujours autant ce que j'ai lu et je vais enchainer la suite avec un grand plaisir !

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Original review: A very good military SF book which bodes well for this series. We don't have time to be bored and we almost end up feeling sorry for poor Grayson against whom fate seems to be working hard.

Rereading: Nothing more to say compared to the last time. I still really enjoy what I've read and I'm going to read the rest with great pleasure !

So, probably some day the author read Starship Troopers and watched Blackhawk Down and thought: hey,why don't I narrate them together in writing? So, 0 originality points and 0 imagination/innovation points out of 5.
BUT.
I absolutely loved the ride (I have read Starship Troopers many times and will do it again, watched Blackhawk Down even more times and will watch it again) and also appreciated how well the author balances everything, from the excellent, functional writing to the action / non-action ratio,the losses to survival ratio and the believable to “lucky main character”.
I will definitely read the rest of the series and consider myself a Kloos fan from now on.
Also, basic training was point on, most of it fitted perfectly into my own memories about it :)
So far, I find this the best military scifi I have read, except Heinlein.

[b:Terms of Enlistment 17619479 Terms of Enlistment Marko Kloos https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1365637085s/17619479.jpg 24585130] is good military science fiction. Period. The writing style is solid and held my attention all the way through.It has a lot of the standard military trope characters: for example, the tough as nails Sargent, the clueless self aggrandizing staffer, the hard but fair commander. Those tropes exist because they reflect a good deal of real life, and Kloos uses them well to push his story forward. He also does some unexpected things with them. (You'll have to read to find out.)The basic story is common enough. A young person joins the military, matures, faces dangers, and has adventures. The main character in this case is a young man, Andrew Grayson, who at the start of the story lives in a nasty welfare slum area of a dystopian future Boston. He joins the military as a way out of his dead-end existence. This isn't as easy as it sounds. Many apply and few pass the tests. The story then follows Andrew through training, duty assignment, and his blooding as a soldier.About half-way through the story takes a sharp and unexpected (to me) turn and goes somewhere else. What I thought was going to be an exploration of the dystopian future Earth turns into a alien encounter war story. (Marko Kloos makes it work, but I have to wonder about that other story that he almost wrote.)The writing is crisp, the characterization is strong, and there is plenty of action. If you like Elizabeth Moon's military SF or Tanya Huff's Valor series, you will probably like this.

Executive Summary: A good, but not great start to this series. I liked it enough to continue on.

Audiobook: Luke Daniels is a fantastic narrator as always, however I tend to associate him with lighter/fun type stories, so it took a bit to get used to him narrating a military sci-fi/more serious story.

Full Review
I picked this one up on a daily deal. I'm not a huge military fiction fan, but I like space opera and I was hoping to get some of that here.

Since those were my expectations coming in, I found the first two thirds a bit underwhelming. We start in a near future Earth. Things are bleak. The planet is in bad shape and we've begun colonizing other worlds. Spots on colony ships are hard to come by. Many people are living in welfare funded slums.

The protagonist joins the military in an attempt to escape his life. We get a pretty generic and mostly forgettable boot camp story arc. Then I think even more than our protagonist, I'm super disappointed that he's staying on earth. The middle arc is never really explained though it is at least more interesting than the first arc.

Finally in the third arc things start to pick up. It was here that the book really started to grab my interest. Now that we have the space opera type story I was hoping for when I first picked up this book, I was finally enjoying it.

The world building is pretty bleak. You can tell the author has a military background. It also seems to me he has a very low opinion of poor people, especially those on welfare. I found myself conflicted at times between the protagonist's plight and the supposed antagonists during the middle arc. None of it was very well explained though. Maybe if it had, I would have been less conflicted. The protagonist isn't always likable initially, but he grew on me as the story went on.

Overall I enjoyed this book, and it got better as it went on. This gives me hope the next book will be better, and I plan to check it out at some point in the near future.

Totally fun. Plot-driven storylines are perfect brain candy and I really enjoyed this. It's the perfect pace, the right amount of downtime between action-packed sequences. I can't wait to start reading the next book.

I usually don't dig Sci-fi too much but this was a serious joy ride. Nothing flashy about the writing. Nothing flashy about the characters. But I would recommend this to anyone.