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A review by g_r_frank
Tusk by Nathan M. Hurst
3.0
I’ll try to describe my experience with this book (its good and "coulda been better" points) without getting into the actual story, so as not to spoil any of the interesting plot points and twists.
I picked up Tusk (book one of "A Sol Protocol") on the basis of the writing style as seen in the prologue preview, the reader reviews of it on Amazon, and the overall story synopsis which sounded interesting to me. The writing style was very readable and the author describes things well, painting a good mental picture of the setting, the action and the characters. The writing style and the plot kept me going, but the complexity in the telling of the tale was a bit of a distraction.
The book's chapters aren't numbered and there is no table of contents. With the exception of a prologue, the chapters are only “titled" by the name of the character whose point of view we will be viewing it from, so several chapters have the same name as we revisit the POV of some of them. This technique did help to keep track of which character we are seeing through, as there were a lot of POV characters, although I think there were a few places where the POV slipped out of the character who was telling that part. While we are being introduced to the many characters, several go into a daydream about their past and then "Snap out of it," back to the current events of the story, in order to deliver some of their backstory history. Some of this is useful and some seemed like it wandered a bit. The technique worked well enough, but it may have been used a few too many times. Overall, I think it would have strengthened the story if it was told from just a few POV characters - maybe even combining a few characters into one to reduce the number of names the reader has to track.
There are several plot lines running parallel in the book which made the story more interesting than a simple one plot-line story. There are a lot of surprising plot twists and character motivation turns that are introduced in the story. However, I personally felt like the story bogged down a bit in the middle. We hear the POV of several characters telling their side of some of the same events, which felt like a re-hashing of segments of the story already covered. Fewer points of view or fewer characters could have helped this. Once the initial inciting incident problem seems to be resolved, the plot expands a bit into more interesting areas at about the 2/3 point. I think if that slow part of the story had been streamlined, and the number of POV characters had been condensed, the plot could have been explored in more detail and the main characters defined better. Several characters whose personal thoughts and experiences the reader invests time in suddenly die in the story, it made it hard to know which one to invest in as I got to the end of the book. Because there were so many characters to learn about, some of them seemed to blend together into generic characters and I had to go back a few times to be sure which was which.
I never really understood why this book was titled Tusk. The shuttle in the story with that name does not feature greatly in the narrative except near the start as it brings characters to the setting where some of the major action takes place, but the ship itself does not feature that much in the plot compared to the characters which later in the book are in another shuttle which seems to have no name at all.
I gave this a 3 star although I might call it more of a 3.5 rating. The biggest downsides were the too many/extraneous characters issue, the bog down in the middle of the book and the extra shuttles, topics and side characters which I think just added a little too much unneeded narrative.
On the good side, I liked many of the ideas this story explored. The author introduced some unique takes on regularly used sci-fi tropes like AI, colony ships, hibernation, and cloning which made it more interesting than some books that touch those subjects. The changes in the plot kept things interesting except for some of the middle of the book that felt a little slow. The story could have been improved in my opinion would if fewer point of view characters had been used to tell it and if the main characters we end up with at the end had been made clearer to the reader early on. The book ends after wrapping up a few of the major story plot lines, doing a few surprise reveals and twists and introduces some new challenges/problems for the characters that will obviously be pursued in the next book.
The book's storyline interested me enough to go on to the next book in the series. I'm hoping that since the main characters seem to be more clearly defined now, and the scene set, the next book might be worth a read. I hope my critique was not too harsh, I did enjoy the read. I just felt there were some things that could have been done to make it better.
I picked up Tusk (book one of "A Sol Protocol") on the basis of the writing style as seen in the prologue preview, the reader reviews of it on Amazon, and the overall story synopsis which sounded interesting to me. The writing style was very readable and the author describes things well, painting a good mental picture of the setting, the action and the characters. The writing style and the plot kept me going, but the complexity in the telling of the tale was a bit of a distraction.
The book's chapters aren't numbered and there is no table of contents. With the exception of a prologue, the chapters are only “titled" by the name of the character whose point of view we will be viewing it from, so several chapters have the same name as we revisit the POV of some of them. This technique did help to keep track of which character we are seeing through, as there were a lot of POV characters, although I think there were a few places where the POV slipped out of the character who was telling that part. While we are being introduced to the many characters, several go into a daydream about their past and then "Snap out of it," back to the current events of the story, in order to deliver some of their backstory history. Some of this is useful and some seemed like it wandered a bit. The technique worked well enough, but it may have been used a few too many times. Overall, I think it would have strengthened the story if it was told from just a few POV characters - maybe even combining a few characters into one to reduce the number of names the reader has to track.
There are several plot lines running parallel in the book which made the story more interesting than a simple one plot-line story. There are a lot of surprising plot twists and character motivation turns that are introduced in the story. However, I personally felt like the story bogged down a bit in the middle. We hear the POV of several characters telling their side of some of the same events, which felt like a re-hashing of segments of the story already covered. Fewer points of view or fewer characters could have helped this. Once the initial inciting incident problem seems to be resolved, the plot expands a bit into more interesting areas at about the 2/3 point. I think if that slow part of the story had been streamlined, and the number of POV characters had been condensed, the plot could have been explored in more detail and the main characters defined better. Several characters whose personal thoughts and experiences the reader invests time in suddenly die in the story, it made it hard to know which one to invest in as I got to the end of the book. Because there were so many characters to learn about, some of them seemed to blend together into generic characters and I had to go back a few times to be sure which was which.
I never really understood why this book was titled Tusk. The shuttle in the story with that name does not feature greatly in the narrative except near the start as it brings characters to the setting where some of the major action takes place, but the ship itself does not feature that much in the plot compared to the characters which later in the book are in another shuttle which seems to have no name at all.
I gave this a 3 star although I might call it more of a 3.5 rating. The biggest downsides were the too many/extraneous characters issue, the bog down in the middle of the book and the extra shuttles, topics and side characters which I think just added a little too much unneeded narrative.
On the good side, I liked many of the ideas this story explored. The author introduced some unique takes on regularly used sci-fi tropes like AI, colony ships, hibernation, and cloning which made it more interesting than some books that touch those subjects. The changes in the plot kept things interesting except for some of the middle of the book that felt a little slow. The story could have been improved in my opinion would if fewer point of view characters had been used to tell it and if the main characters we end up with at the end had been made clearer to the reader early on. The book ends after wrapping up a few of the major story plot lines, doing a few surprise reveals and twists and introduces some new challenges/problems for the characters that will obviously be pursued in the next book.
The book's storyline interested me enough to go on to the next book in the series. I'm hoping that since the main characters seem to be more clearly defined now, and the scene set, the next book might be worth a read. I hope my critique was not too harsh, I did enjoy the read. I just felt there were some things that could have been done to make it better.