Second Star by Dana Stabenow
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Stabenow builds a very interesting world where this planet has reached its sell by date and off earth stations are being built for colonization. The resources come from the Moon and asteroid belts, the projects are expected to pay back their start up costs with interest, and no one is expecting Utopia, just a place they can safely call home. Where the book falls very short is that there's way too much telling in the first half - literal telling of characters explaining things to each other that they certainly would have already known, but the reader needs to know to get on with the story. The worst offense of this is a brand new security chief who apparently took the job knowing nothing about living off Terra. Then there's a very obvious bias against military leadership that we're supposed to accept without any proof that the military's ends won't justify its means. And finally, every body lies. Without lies, the story couldn't have happened, couldn't have had its big action scene, and worst of all, couldn't have a happy ending. A brave new world built on lies is not a brave world at all.
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