Contra Alliance: Book I - Shadows of the Past Book

The first third of this book was a little hard to get into. There was quite a bit of infodumping and very little of the actual story. It made things hard to read and I think definitely could have been done more smoothly. The story takes place in the future, and it seems we were given every detail about what had previously gone on, the state of things now, etc. And then we got background details on just about every character. It began to get tedious.

Once I got past 100 pages or so, we got into the real meat of the story and it moved at a nice pace. There were still times when I was taken out of the story when the author stopped telling the story to give us more information. I did enjoy the story, but I think I could have liked it a whole lot better if not for that.

There were a lot of characters and I did get them confused at times, especially because they all had code names like Xxplosive, Justice, Rapidfire, Breakdown, and a lot more. And the bad guys had code names too (or their names were just weird like that), so when the story switched to the bad guy POV, it always took me a minute to realize.

I really think fans of military science fiction would like this one. It's not my usual genre, which may be why I struggled a bit with it. The book seems to be a very well thought out, well planned start to a series, and even though this book includes quite a lot of setup, I still liked it, and will continue on with the series. I'm quite interested to see what happens next.