/lit/ - Literature

>>19335225
Aftershocks, The Palladium Wars #1 - Marko Kloos (2019)
The plot seemed to be loosely based on a mix of post-world wars Germany, which ought to be familiar to the author as he was born and raised in Germany. The narrative was told from four perspectives, two of each from both the occupied and the occupiers. I was only particularly invested in the starting viewpoint character and given the length of the novel, I think having four was too many. The four are: a recently released POW trying to decide what to do with his life, a character who exists to have plot shown to them for the reader's benefit, a human face for the occupation, and a business leader of the occupied.
I had a lot of conflicted feelings about this relatively short nominally military science fiction novel. Probably almost any review will tell you the same thing, that this was only a small portion of a story. By the end of the the book the setting was mostly set up, but that's all. I can only guess at what the overarching plot was meant to be based on the relevant historical parallels. I don't fault him on a commercial basis for spreading it so thin, but as a work of entertainment it left a lot to be desired. As a note, Kloos is a member of GRRM's writer consortium and explicitly thanked Scalzi, whose writing this moderately resembled.
Aside from a few silly moments, this made for fine enough reading, but the problem is what this series holds for the future based on this first novel and the length of his other series. It would seem that each book will progress the narrative as little as possible so that it can be as many as books as possible. Again, I don't fault him for that, but I don't think I'm interested enough to follow through on that premise. I'll probably quit here to avoid becoming committed. Even if they were all already released my answer would likely still be the same. It falls just barely short of being sufficient for me to continue.
Rating: 3.5/5