A continuation from the Better part of Valor, unexpectedly so, in that rather than just being another adventure of Torin, there is continuity, with some of the previous artifacts making an important contribution to the plot. The story opens with Torin realising that she and her current paramour are just about the only people who remember that they departed the alien spacecraft BigYellow on one of it's escape craft. There seems to be no trace of it, the scientists don't have it, the Intel arm don't have it, and no-body even remembers it landing inside the battle-cruiser. However asking any questions about it seems to trigger official reprimands.

However whiles she's back on the main Military homebase, she's actually supposed to be helping one of her former Instructors recuperate from a serious wound. He's spent several months having most of his body re-grown and integrating back into physical reality takes a little getting used to. Torin and he are supposed to join a recruit platoon on their first serious training expedition to the Crucible facility. Things start going wrong almost immediately when the scenario that's been programmed for the recruits (which Torin is aware of) doesn't follow the rules. Torin naturally originally assigns this into the Others having hacked into the IT systems, but the evidence is starting to look flimsy. She does manage to lead the recruits to an abandoned fortification, where they can endure the besieging drones until help arrives.

I'm more impressed by the hooks linking back into the prior story than I was by the plot itself. Recruits on a march is fairly dull, even with all the normal innuendo of the aliens. Fun but still very lighthearted reading, you never get the impression Torin herself is in any real danger, and all the rest are merely walk-on cannon fodder without any sense on permanence. Still interested to see where it's all going to go though. ( )

Torin is in a hot mess as usual. In this book she escorts a major and his doctor to a marine training planet, and of course there are a bunch of recruits too that will finish their training. And then boom the planet turns on them. But Torin can sure handle herself, and see to that people around her stays alive. She is so very kick-ass.

But what I liked the most was that Torin started to question things, and I never questioned things either but now I did that too. Humans and other beings help The Elder races fight The others. But, here is the but, why are the fighting? I realized that I did not know, cos yes Torin did not know. And only The Elder races has ever been in peace talk. Sure I wondered about The Others before but now I really wonder. And because of that I want more, because I need to know now.

Of course there are other things going on that I can't get into, why the planet turned on them. Things that has to do with book 2 and of course the whole aspect of Torin wondering what the hell is going on.

Kick-ass action, a few dilemmas on the way ;) trust me on that. And did I say action? Lots of action and shooting. ( )

"" ( )

Again with the loving Tanya Huff. This whole series is about, basically, how war is a mindfuck. This book takes it to another level, with a training exercise turning deadly and a twist that, while it's fairly heavily foreshadowed, brings the sort of wacky previous book into horrifying context. I adore the main character, the overall queer sensibility, and the hoo-rah Marine attitude tempered by the increasingly impossible situations. ( )

Military SF, while I'm willing to read it occasionally, isn't exactly my favorite subgenre, so when I got a copy of A Confederation of Valor (an omnibus volume containing the first two novels in the Confederation series) through SantaThing a few years back, I was a little bit dubious, even though I'd enjoyed some of Tanya Huff's other books. I was very pleasantly surprised by it, though, as it turned out to be exactly the kind of military SF I didn't even know I wanted to read, thanks to its strong focus on characters rather than hardware.

This third volume didn't grab me quite as well as the first two. A lot of that is probably my fault. It took me way too long to get to it after finishing the first two novels, which was a little problematic, since it turned out to be more strongly tied into previous events than I expected. Also, I kept trying to read it while seriously sleep-deprived, which never helps. Some of it, though, has to do with the fact that the plot, which involves a training exercise gone badly wrong, was pretty contrived, and not quite as well-paced as it might have been. But it was fun, nevertheless. I love the dry space marine corps sense of humor, and the protagonist, Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr, is a great character, definitely the person I'd want with me if, god forbid, I ever somehow found myself in combat. ( )