Cascade Failure

Dee 📖 (book aspect) reviewed Cascade Failure by L. M. Sagas

Entertaining enough

3 stars

This novel is a fun action-adventure romp involving starships and a number of colorful characters. It is not a elaborate story with sophisticated story that explores complex themes of political or philosophical nature. Sometimes you want a fun action-adventure romp, though, and this book mostly delivers in that area. There's dramatic chases, creepy abandoned facilities, fighting, narrow rescues, cleverly competent problem solving, and other such things.

One complaint is that at times the writing can be a bit too verbose, throwing the pacing off. L. M. Sagas has a habit of writing paragraphs detailing characters' mental state at emotionally fraught moments, but often, instead of conveying the intensity of the character's feelings, it just feels redundant. One could also get into nitpicks about how some of the side characters are a bit flat, or how the plot, devoid of any large gaping holes, nevertheless sometimes takes some liberties for convenience. …

This novel is a fun action-adventure romp involving starships and a number of colorful characters. It is not a elaborate story with sophisticated story that explores complex themes of political or philosophical nature. Sometimes you want a fun action-adventure romp, though, and this book mostly delivers in that area. There's dramatic chases, creepy abandoned facilities, fighting, narrow rescues, cleverly competent problem solving, and other such things.

One complaint is that at times the writing can be a bit too verbose, throwing the pacing off. L. M. Sagas has a habit of writing paragraphs detailing characters' mental state at emotionally fraught moments, but often, instead of conveying the intensity of the character's feelings, it just feels redundant. One could also get into nitpicks about how some of the side characters are a bit flat, or how the plot, devoid of any large gaping holes, nevertheless sometimes takes some liberties for convenience. But, if the book is to be an action-adventure romp, then those additional complaints aren't as big of a deal.

Tak! reviewed Cascade Failure by L. M. Sagas (Ambit's Run, #1)

4 stars

Cascade Failure is an action-packed scifi novel about a ragtag spaceship crew of misfits that gets involved in Significant Events. It's snappy and engaging, but it's not heavy on horizon-expanding content - it feels a bit like a space-opera version of a Tales of the Ketty Jay novel

dellis@bookwyrm.social reviewed Cascade Failure by L. M. Sagas (Ambit's Run, #1)

Not for me

2 stars

Content warning Here are the problems:

At first, I thought this would be a beach read, not anything heavy or anything, just a good ol' space adventure. I made it about 90% through but gave up. Everyone from the characters to the narrators loves their 20th century idioms. It seems unlikely that either hundreds of years in the future that those idioms will survive. And there is a lot of telling instead of showing. You could probably chop fifty pages of exposition and it wouldn't affect the story line.
The blurb on the book cover mentioned that this is like a Becky Chambers' novel. Well, if you mean there are spaceships, then yes. Is it anything else like a Chambers' novel? no. On the plus side, the characters are interesting, and the plot is ok. Two stars, it might work for you, but it didn't do anything for me.