A review by tenthrow
Against All Odds by Jeffery H. Haskell

2.0

There are things about this book that I want to like, but the negatives outweigh the positives. For one, this thing reads like some attempt at thinly veiled right wing propaganda. I say thinly veiled because it isn't subtle... At all. Yet I get the feeling that the author thinks it is. Muslims are evil raping murderers. Yikes. I maybe could have given it a little grace if there was a muslim or two on the good guy's ship that wasn't just there for murdering and raping. You know like in real life, but no, that is too much to ask. The prose is decent and reads easily but there are so many details that are laughably lazy. Character names are so on the nose it takes you out of the story every time you read them. Governor Rasputin of Kremlin station... sigh. I found the mention of money distracting. The book is set 1000 years in our future but people who don't make a lot of money have a couple hundred dollars in their bank account and a big cargo haul is worth a million dollars. So in a thousand years they solved inflation and returned it to the levels we associate with the early 2000's? Lazy. I also find mil-sci stories that take place this far in the future extremely depressing when in that much time it's still just white Americans at war with Russia and {cringe} muslims. Why? Haskell is clearly a writer who COULD handle something better, so why? It's beyond frustrating.