Courageous: The Lost Fleet 3

Courageous

(Jack Campbell)

Teaser: The situation is dire for the Fleet as their supplies are at critically low levels. After barely escaping being blown to pieces by the Syndics, Captain Geary has to find a solution or they will have to face the end of the journey sooner than expected. An old Syndic mining facility is located that may have the supplies that they so desperately need. Now, Geary has to find a way to steal the supplies, subdue the enemy crew, and keep in line with his strict code of ethics.

Short Thought: Not as good as the other books in the series, but still mildly entertaining.

Expanded Thoughts: This series is starting to seriously frustrate me! I feel like it is going nowhere at a painfully slow pace. The idea behind the story is brilliant, but the pace is awful and I want to strangle some of the characters. The first two books were great, so what happened?

I have a gigantic list of gripes. First, can I seriously just open a ship door and shove Rione out into space? For real! She is the most redundant, narrow-minded, anal, annoying, and impossible female character I think that I have ever come across. She seriously has two lines in the whole novel, "I'm not going to let you turn into Black Jack," and "I'm an important politician, you need to respect me while I butt in on your area of expertise." Seriously, it portrayed women very badly like frivolous, entitled, and air-headed banshees. (We are only banshees on Fridays, dang it.) I swear that 75% of the novel was just her nagging and griping at poor John Geary.

Next, there were a lot of a repetitive scenes and lines. I counted John saying the same lines (verbatim) more than 3 times. I almost had deja vu when I read then like, "did my bookmark move? I swear I've already read this." The same is true with the long-winded conferences. I think you could seriously just read the first 20 pages, 10 pages in the middle, and 20 at the end and know what went down and be less frustrated.

Next, I swear nothing happened. Okay, a few things happened, but this book should have probably been combined with another one. It could easily be told in 35 pages. (All you would have to do is take out Rione griping, seriously.)

There were still some specks of the things that made me fall into obsession with this series in the first place. The author is unrivaled in his ability to write understandable combat scenes. I am very ignorant about that type of stuff, and I understand the movements very well. The characters (some of them) are great and very human. There is a slight underlying tension to the story that keeps propelling that story. It was just covered in tons and tons of repetitive blah in this particular book.

All that being said, I am going to continue with this series because I believe it will go back to being an awesome space opera. (And I've already purchased the next one, heh.) I love this series, but this book, to put it in bluntly, sucked, sucked, and then sucked some more at times.

Additional Notes: This is the 3rd novel in the Lost Fleet Series by Jack Campbell.