Any book where the best character is the ship is a total win in my world. ( )

You can't write multiple narrators in first person! It just isn't done. No one would read it. It's too confusing.

That's what people said to me when I began writing. I needed to do so for a specific reason. Gareth Powell, on the other hand, apparently challenged himself to do so just to see if he could. In the acknowledgements page, he said fellow SF writer, Emma Newman, challenged him to try his hand at first person.

It works well. I can't wait to continue getting to know Captain Konstanz, Childe, Sudak, Preston, and especially Trouble Dog. ( )

A novel that started slow but promised to explore interesting themes (the legacies of war! struggling with the weight of your sins! sentient spaceships!)—and then totally failed to deliver in all respects.

This book was plagued by its constant POV shifts between a cast of unsympathetic and, worse, uninteresting characters; the jumps from one cliffhanger to another were infuriating, and there was never enough time spent with one character before we were hopping to another for me to get invested in any of them. [VAGUE SPOILERS] I hated the ending so much. The way it was resolved with a deus ex machina was so anticlimactic, and I felt like it actively undermined any messages on war we might have gotten from this book. The two antagonists were complete cardboard cutouts, just totally stereotypical villains, who basically came out of nowhere for how irrelevant they were to the first half of the book, and their uncomplicated shittiness was used to justify the Trouble Dog going back to its war-mongering ways with zero self-awareness from the narrative, which I guess was okay with murder and military action as long as the targets are the bad guys??? [/END VAGUE SPOILERS]

Personally, as a robot/artificial intelligence aficionado, the Trouble Dog was a major letdown. She just felt too human to be any fun, and IMO she did not get nearly enough screentime, despite having the most interesting premise as a character out of the whole cast and being, from the summary, the ostensible protagonist.

The worldbuilding here was pretty standard, and I don't remember any really interesting ideas being explored to my liking. I especially did not like the modern day references ("Christmas price raising" came up at one point), which kept breaking my suspension of disbelief.

Also felt like the author had a weird thing for older women being mean to incompetent younger men they feel responsible for but don't respect. Despite this being something I could theoretically vibe with, the execution just made the older women characters seem like assholes for no reason, and it was so, so discomfiting to read. ( )

This is a good story and it is well written. For that reason I'm giving 4 stars. The non-human protagonists here are very, very interesting and they will be the reason I pick up book 2 in the series. The setting owes a lot to Iain M Banks, Peter F Hamilton, Neal Asher etc. SF Books with sentient Space-Ships is filling up as a genre. Subtracting the 5th star because, as others have pointed out, this book feels a bit light in comparison to the others. However the story arcs for the characters are beautifully drawn. Excellent Space Opera. ( )

There's a quiet intensity to Powell's storytelling. Maybe it's the AI voice of the ship Trouble Dog or the somewhat resigned airs from the ship's captain Sal Konstanz that provide a steady thread even through space combat. That's not to say the story isn't exciting; it absolutely is.

EMBERS OF WAR is the beginning of a trilogy and it does what any first in a series should do: it gets us ready. It's the bubbling just before coming to the surface. The story is told with multiple points of view, but it wasn't choppy or hard to follow. Each character's voice is different and the wants and needs are specific to him or her or it.

Sadly, I was surprised at how many women take center-stage--not disappointed, just surprised. That shouldn't be such a shock by now. Ultimately, it was a happy surprise and I found the female roles compelling. There was never a question as to their abilities, nor did any of them have to provide a justification for her station.

Mostly, I was intrigued by the character, Trouble Dog. She's a complicated ship. She's made choices, has a past, and is being judged by those who knew her from her time before. It's hard to not think of her as human, but that's part of the mystery and uniqueness of Powell's construct. Without giving too much away, I was holding my breath for the last few chapters wondering how the story would progress. ( )