This one was very different than what I usually read in this genre.
It almost seems like the author delights in subverting expectations and clicheés.

The protagonists are refreshingly uncompromising and people just die in conflicts.
While being a nice change of pace this also leads to a few problems.
Many characters seem to be very blasé about tragedy and death.
This problem is confounded by the audiobook narrator because she emphasizes this blaséness.
I think a narrator trying to counteract this problem would've gone a long way to dampen that impression.
One of the causes for this impression is the breakneck pacing of this book.
I've never read a book that is paced so fast from front to back, its dizzying.
There is just no time for emotional impact. It's almost like the author had a maximum word count target.
This clashes in a few scenes with supposed war trauma the mc still suffers from.
By setting the anchor of emotional involvement to basically zero the few times the aftermath of these traumatic experiences come up they seem almost melodramatic and out of place.

By rushing through the plot at this breakneck speed we get a look at a lot of different aspects of the world but because there is never enough time for more than a glimpse. It is hard to tell how consistent the world-building actually is.

The next paragraph might be considered a light spoiler but I believe it doesn't spoil anything relevant.
A pretty important element, later on, is the US government and its structure but sadly how it is portrayed is incredibly naive and stupid. There are lots of single points of failure that the bad guys want to exploit. A government built like that, in reality, could probably be toppled by a few teenagers. It's an alternative world, I get it, but no government could possibly exist with a naive structure to that extent. Just research the public part of how the actual US government security structure is built to get a clue of how bad this really is.

I really enjoyed how different this book is from the beaten path of UF but it could've done with an additional 100 or so pages as well as a less gullible government structure but the latter probably would've thrown a pretty big wrench into the main plot. ( )