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The Light Brigade

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The Light Brigade

Written by: Kameron Hurley, Jackie Sanders
Narrated by: Cara Gee
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NAMED BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY AS A BEST BOOK OF 2019

“Passionately brutal, fierce, and furious in voice and pace. It’s a particularly cinematic experience of war, Full Metal Jacket meets Edge of Tomorrow.” —The New York Times

From the Hugo Award­­–winning author of The Stars Are Legion comes a science fiction thriller about a futuristic war during which soldiers are broken down into light in order to get them to the front lines on Mars.

They said the war would turn us into light.
I wanted to be counted among the heroes who gave us this better world.

The Light Brigade: it’s what soldiers fighting the war against Mars call the ones who come back…different. Grunts in the corporate corps get busted down into light to travel to and from interplanetary battlefronts. Everyone is changed by what the corps must do in order to break them down into light. Those who survive learn to stick to the mission brief—no matter what actually happens during combat.

Dietz, a fresh recruit in the infantry, begins to experience combat drops that don’t sync up with the platoon’s. And Dietz’s bad drops tell a story of the war that’s not at all what the corporate brass want the soldiers to think is going on.

Is Dietz really experiencing the war differently, or is it combat madness? Trying to untangle memory from mission brief and survive with sanity intact, Dietz is ready to become a hero—or maybe a villain; in war it’s hard to tell the difference. Military Science Fiction Space Opera Time Travel Fiction War Solider Interstellar Solar System

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What the critics say

"Narrator Cara Gee perfectly evokes the weary drawl of a battle-hardened soldier in this intricately constructed science fiction audiobook. The listener follows Dietz (first name unknown) through her mandatory training in the Corporate Corps. She learns to follow orders, to kill, and to cross the galaxy as a beam of light in order to fight the enemy that attacked her planet and destroyed her family. Gee's surface-level portrayal of Dietz seems flat and unemotional—but in a nuanced way that hints at deep anger and confusion. Gee gets more to chew on as the war progresses and Dietz becomes frightened about what's really going on. Jackie Sanders aces her small role as a corporate interrogator who tries to break Dietz."
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Very good overall, the plot is intriguing, the characters are solid, though a few of them are mildly flat, and the message is good, but a little ham fisted at times.

Narration isn't great, but is competent.

Very good, but it does drag in the middle

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I enjoyed this book and the main character is so well thought out and good! very strong character development overall as well I liked it.

good

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Definitely worth a purchase for the story alone, but the readers voice was very flat, lacking nuance from one character to the next. There are sections of dialogue where you can't really tell who exactly is speaking because the performers voice is so similar from one character to the next, and there's no way to distinguish which person is speaking at any one moment as a result. otherwise it was a pretty good reading and I would still recommend the purchase.

cool story, but the reader was a bit flat

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Hurley is (in my experience) nearly unparalleled as a world builder. She has an incredible capacity to make a place feel real, to anticipate the quirks and divergences her concepts demand. That is combined here with a message that has never been more relevant, about social control, corporatism, and the untrammeled evil of the use of force for dishonest purpose.

Military sci-fi for a humanist era

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