Warning: Cliffhanger (There was a battle. It isn’t done. Why would you end this here?)

Amazon Blurb:

The Lost Fleet continues its perilous journey home.

Badly damaged and low on supplies, the Alliance Fleet is raiding Syndic mines for raw materials-and Captain “Black Jack” Geary hopes they can continue to remain one step ahead of their enemies. But the Syndics are the least of Geary’s worries when he learns of the existence of aliens with the power to annihilate the human race.

Quote:

“Oddly enough, we’ve yet to win. You’d think somebody would have asked before this why the regrettable but necessary measures haven’t actually produced the promised results.”

Review:

Courageous sees us to the midway point of our journey home. We’re still deep in enemy territory, the end is nowhere in sight, and Black Jack Geary is getting tested again and again. This series is exhausting, and we are only halfway through it!

The big problem in Courageous is that we are quickly running low on supplies. Resupplying is tricky at best, impossible at worst. It is a war of attrition, and they are on the wrong side. They have nothing to barter with, even if the Syndicate would barter with them. They have to make demands, and they cannot trust the Syndicate. They’ve already shown themselves to be utterly untrustworthy. We’re jumping from system to system to system, fighting more and more. It is only logical that this is going to be a problem.

Since Courageous deals so much with the logistics, I was really disappointed when I realised that we, the readers, knew nothing about what was going on. We just get a basic “oh we’re running low on this and that” message from others every so often, but it is always just one or two things with a vague “plus a whole lot more”. Only Geary really knows what the fleet has and what they don’t have. As a reader who wants to become the main character while reading, I’m just not able to do this with this series. I’m just incapable of doing it because I know so little that isn’t actively happening on screen at the time.

Courageous is also very heavy on the character interactions. It still only has a handful of real side characters. Yet, two of them are apparently love interests. Seriously, no one told me this was a romance series. There is just so much relationship drama in this book! I think it should come with a sticker “Warning: Love triangle, jealousy, denial, avoidance and drama!“. There was almost as much relationship drama as there was plot related to us getting home again! There was just so much going on with them, and so much of it was annoying.

On a more personal level, Geary is also frightened that he is becoming the Black Jack everyone thinks he is supposed to be. The void is calling on him, and he wants to act on it. He wants to rule the fleet with an iron fist. Yet for some reason, he won’t let himself. He has to stay human. So there is a lot of internal struggle in Courageous, too.

Yes, I’m a reader that focuses on characters. While Courageous managed to give me more of what I wanted, it was also in about the opposite direction of what I wanted. The side characters are still completely forgettable except for the love interests who are becoming increasingly annoying. While plot is important to me, too, the battle ended off in the middle of the entire thing, and I felt betrayed at this. I just hope it improves from here.

To read more reviews for this series, check out the The Lost Fleet series page!