Review: The Legion Awakes

The Legion Awakes by J.R. Handley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A great first book by a new author and US Army veteran. Captures the mil-sf genre very well.

Can't wait to get to book 2

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[adding on over a year later]

This is the first book published by a US Army vet and his wife.  They are a team.  He is using writing as a way of processing his time in the Army.

Our protagonist awakens from some sort of hypersleep and is put to work training new recruits.  He uses what are considered "old-school" methods of training to get better performance out of his recruits.  They are pretty lazy and marginally competent when he picks them up.  But soon he has a platoon that is coming along nicely. 

The high point of the training exercise is when his new unit is tasked with being the sacrificial lambs for an annual training exercise for the larger unit.  They come up with a plan that takes out that larger unit.  The scene is reminiscent of Clint Eastwood's "Heartbreak Ridge" movie.

And then the world goes pear-shaped.  Our protagonist and his unit have to figure out who the bad-guys are and how to protect those needing protecting.

The author gets military service 100% right.  It even tastes right.  He then tosses in a bunch of new technology.  One of his very capable underlings re-programs the unit that produces clothes.  As a result, another...equally capable.....underling is caught wearing some "cute" panties instead of the standard-issue stuff.  Sometimes a girl just wants to be pretty even if it is just for herself.

It's a "new army" and our protagonist has to adjust to them as much as they have to adjust to him.

His unit ends up re-tasking and repurposing a lot of technology so that they can fight more efficiently.  That hard work pays off in the end.

While some of the later entries in the series didn't land as well for me, this is an outstanding book that is worthy of much broader attention.