Terms of Enlistment

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.