Fred recommended this to me, after going around explaining to me why furglings are worse than furgs - which told me he was really into it. I finally got around it to it - and now I'm going around calling things jenfurglings. The scary bit is that it sounds perfectly normal.

I'll be the first to admit - I love to champion character writers (finally! another author who admits that their characters hijack the book!) and small publishers. It was a pleasure to read a well written and well edited book with a highly unique perspective on what an alien invasion of Earth could really mean.

Forging Zero will challenge your view of the world and the possibilities you consider for the future. It may very well challenge your view of right and wrong. It will certainly hurt your ethics. And it will make you call people furglings. ( )

Amazing! if you loved A Soldier's Duty by Jean Johnson, you'd love this one too! Review coming! ( )

Joe Dobbs was big for his age and all he ever wanted to be was a soldier, like his dad. But not this way. When aliens annex the Earth and conscript every able-bodied child between the ages of 5 and 12 to serve in their Congressional Army, 14 year old Joe is accidentally swept up in the draft and forced to fight for people and politics he'd never even heard of before the aliens landed. As the oldest of the human "recruits," Joe quickly becomes big brother to an entire generation of frightened children, and must help them pull together to survive the brutal training regimen of a cold and calculating alien government.

Author Sara King paints a complex portrait of one boy's life and forced journey into manhood, set against a sweeping backdrop of political manoeuvring and inter-species in-fighting. Feeling at times like a cross between Scalzi's [b:Old Man's War|51964|Old Man's War|John Scalzi|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1346671475s/51964.jpg|50700] and Card's [b:Ender's Game|375802|Ender's Game (Ender's Saga, #1)|Orson Scott Card|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1364033163s/375802.jpg|2422333], Forging Zero is everything you want in a space opera, only darker.

All that being said, I did find two things a bit irksome. The details of how Joe was accidentally conscripted are drawn out, told in flash-back throughout the story, giving the illusion that there was some grave secret behind it all, leading me to expect a twist of some kind, but that never happened. When it was all explained, I found myself wondering why it had been drawn out in the first place.

My second issue pertains to what I call scene geometry. I often found myself confused about the placement of characters, and their relative sizes. We are given to understand that certain alien species are enormous in comparison to humans, but at other times, Joe and his friends walk around with such creatures, or share a ride in a vehicle, or whatever, and the way it is told seems at odds with their stated relative sizes. Compounding this with my occasional confusion over who was standing where during an important scene, left me scratching my head from time to time, but it was minor and I was invested, so I just ignored it and moved on. But these are truly minor points, and I had a fabulous time with Joe and his cohort, all the same.
( )

Just finished reading this book.. and I loved it :) Hooray a new author that writes the kind of sci fi I really enjoy :)

This is the first of a series - aliens invade invade earth - take away most of the children to train as soldiers for the "Congress" - which comprises many types of aliens across the universe who have joined together (often unwillingly)..

Great characterisation.. amazing new worlds and species.. can't wait to get my hands on more :) ( )

Strong book in the space war genre. I liked it, getting through the 500+ pages in a little over two days! But it was a hard book. I mean in the emotional and psychological sense. It was not until about page 340 pages in that I laughed out loud, and there were only one or two more scenes with laughter after that. Probably a good way to portray kidnapping and turning little children into soldiers, but it was hard to read. I plan to give the next one in the series a try. Send me positive vibes. I would recommend this to hard core military sci-fi fans. Think "ender's game" but more realistic. ( )