Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha LeeMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
With each book in this series, I figured out a bit more and liked it better. I could hardly get a grip on the first book at all, but at this point I got into the characters and began to care about it.
The K-drama perspective adds depth in a way that you just don't get in standard David Webber military SF. Everyone, no matter where they line up, is concerned with aesthetics and allows themselves distractions. It comes off as people living very intensely, fighting for their lives but also over calendrical calculations and art arrangement. The characters go beyond real into a sort of technicolor.
Jedao is a pretty amazing protagonist--he has lived all of this more intently than anyone, including being dead and placed in suspended animation, then versioned for this final episode.
Pacing is still an issue--the book takes about 100 pages to get going, and then gets weird at the end. Calendrical effects come off much more as magic than anything scientific, and I never figured it out to any greater depth than "If a certain system of time measurement, including holidays and observations, is adopted it will grant powers within its influence". Meh. But the twist that makes so much fall into place is worth all of it. So many books don't end well, and this one does. Lee says the series is complete, but there's room for more if he ever changes his mind.
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