Review by radadara -- Steel Reign: Flight of The Starshi...

[radadara]

[Following is a volunteer review of "Steel Reign: Flight of The Starship Concord" by Braxton Cosby.]

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1 out of 4 stars

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Steel Reign: Flight of The Starship Concord by Braxton Cosby follows an ex-spy (Steel Reign), on a mission to save his sister from a fighting ring. The plot was thin at the best times, and never clarified enough to have me on the edge of my seat. The ship/fighting ring that Steel’s sister is on is never described enough to make me anything more than mildly concerned. The sister isn’t even mentioned until the second chapter. The stakes only ever felt high when the characters were actively being shot at.

One reason the conflict feels so flimsy is the characters. None of the secondary characters have their own conflicts or personalities outside of how they relate to Steel. This especially disappointed me as the potential of a found-family dynamic is what drew me to this story in the first place. Even Steel never feels fully fleshed out beyond a trigger-happy loner.

To make things even less discernible, everything is also weighed down by unnecessary exposition about the politics and wars of the Steel Reign universe. And yet nothing that should actually be explained is. I always felt like I was pressed against an opaque glass that led to the world the author held in his mind.

The author also chose to substitute numbers for their words at all times (for example, “no 1” instead of “no one”). At the beginning he claims it is to keep the reader’s attention, but it had the opposite effect on me. Whenever I encountered this switch, it pulled me out of the story. It was effectively a stumbling block in this fog of a story.

The final nail in the coffin, however, is the misogyny. Every woman introduced is described only in terms of how attractive she is. And the main female characters both use seduction as a power. They’re two blurry outlines with stamps marking them as strong women and nothing else.

The only aspects I liked were a few moments of world building and a sweet interaction between Steel and a kid who we never see again.

I rate Steel Reign: Flight of The Starship Concord 1 out of 4 stars. I do not recommend it to anyone; it seems more like a first draft than a finished book. I barely finished reading it, and 99% of my reading time I was not enjoying myself.

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Steel Reign: Flight of The Starship Concord
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