The story is quite well written with good character development and a decent writing style. The voice-acting is excellent. However, the technical side of things seems fairly poorly thought out. Suspension of disbelief is invoked many more times than necessary in this book, in many places seemingly out of laziness. The space battle scenes seem to lack a sense of the actual size of space, and space battles seem more like naval/air battles. For example, a space ship with wings so it can work in atmosphere as well, which seems to go from zooming around the canyons on a moon or the planet’s surface back into orbit in a matter of a few seconds, then sweeping graceful arcs through space. While I confess, this is no worse than some of the SF in Star Wars, it feels a little disappointing on this front. Also, as mentioned by others, the book is steals pretty liberally from The Last Starfighter and Star Wars. As a character study, it’s good, and it would probably make a decent summer movie, but don’t go in expecting anything vaguely like hard SF.