I rate this 6 out of 10. I'm only raising it to a 6 is because of the last chapter. Sort of a 'and they lived happily ever after' chapter.

The Ghost Brigades is a book about a traitor, his research, and the Special Forces of the Colonial Union. Jared Dirac was created for two purposes. Number one is to be a member of the Special Forces and two, to carry around the consciousness of the traitor Charles Boutin. The story is good and sort of stalls out for me towards the end when the evil scientist goes "Bwahahahaha" and starts revealing his evil plan to take over the world. It is Jared Dirac's job to stop him. Or is it? That is the job of Jane Sagan, one of the heroes in the first book, Old Man's War., to find out.   Is Jarad really Jared or is he Charles Boutin.   With the balance of mankind life as they know it Johns Scalzi puts Generals, Majors, scientist, and other Special Forces members in Jared's team have to fight through.

The Ghost Brigades is a good book and even if in my opinion it stalls out a little it is still worth the investment of time for the entertainment you get from reading it. Only a small handful of characters return from the first book I think you need to read Old Man's War before you read this.

The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi (2006)
Book 2 in the Old Man's War

My blog: LQLarry Reads

With TOR putting their monthly ebook freebie program on hold, our booklikes bookclub is going rogue, off the grid, off schedule, free range ... nominate and vote for any books that might be remotely suited for TOR (speculative fiction, fantasy, science fiction ...).

Above, I displayed some of the currently nominated ones; visit the link and scroll down to nominate, vote and edit your voting. (Or click the "Next Books" tab in the bookclub if you lose this post/link.)

Books with most votes will be our September book, the next most likley the October book  (will look at current voting in case that changes during September) ..

Vote for as many as you like. Nominating a book automatically votes for it. If you click "Remove" that will remove your vote, not the book.

Right, so Scalzi seems to be like eating chocolates: YUM! That was good. Where's the next one?

The characters seemed not so strong in this sequel to Old Man's War but we learn a bit more context for humanity's constant interstellar warring with sundry (200+) alien species and there's an interesting plot hook about the motivations of a pair of traitors. It feels like things are still being set up for more, though and indeed there are four more...

The Ghost Brigades" took a while to get going for me. I was honestly worried about getting into a DNF situation because the first part is typical Scalzi-disease. He starts trying to over explain the world and the science behind everything at the same time. Usually I am just confused and then go, wait, I don't think that works. This time I was just 100 percent bored. After a while, I started to skim because reading about DNA is not fascinating. At least to me. But once we got past that, the book really started to hum and I found myself reading as fast as I could because I got worried about the characters we started to follow, and what would become of them.

As readers found out in book #1, "Old Man's War" the Colonial Defence Forces (CDF) have been taking volunteers in order to fight battles across the galaxy. If you can survive two years, you can then be given a homestead on a colony. We followed main character, John Perry, as he volunteers to be part of the army and at the age of 75 has his consciousness transferred to a stronger and faster body (that is green) and through his journeys finds out that the CDF took the DNA of his dead wife and she is now Jane Sagan. 

Book #2 doesn't have John Perry (he is mentioned) but instead we focus on a scientist who turned against the CDF, Charles Boutin. The CDF in a computer finds a copy of Boutin's consciousness and then decides to download it into a new brain in order to find out more information about Boutin's plans.

The person that I would consider the main character is Jared Dirac (who has Boutin's consciousness alongside his own) that has no idea that he has another person's consciousness sitting alongside his own. As CDF waits to see if their experiment works, they send Dirac off to the Ghost Brigades and he finds himself under a platoon under the leadership of Jane Sagan. 

You really do need to read book #1 in order to understand some lines here and there. Some other characters note a change in Jane that happened years ago after she almost died and readers of course realize that is because of what she found out about her former life she doesn't remember due to John Perry. Also, we get to see how others view the Ghost Brigades (not real since they don't have a soul). Unlike with John, Jared is more serious, thoughtful and you start to think more and more about the concepts of a person's soul. Or at least I did.

There are a lot of characters in this one, but I thought it was easy to keep everyone straight. The dialogue at times was funny and I did think the writing was good. The flow was good once we got past the whole this is what DNA does pieces in this book too.

I thought ultimately this book really was about the choices that people make. We start to realize that everyone's choices pushed them to where we get to in this book. That some of these choices may have been morally wrong at times and you can see some of the characters struggling with the weight of those decisions. In the end I loved that we get to see Jared and Jane both evolve a lot further and instead of just taking orders, making sure that they were making choices that they can live with.

I don't know if I will read the third book in this series or not. I don't think that the CDF is full of bad guys, but they are doing some questionable things. I think that some of those things are going to bite them in the butt eventually. I do like the ethical questions that Scalzi brings up as you read this book. You get into the concept of torture, murder, what makes a person real to you and to me, etc. 

Bank:
April 15: $20
April 17: $23. I read "The Wangs Vs the World", electronic pages 368.
April 24: $28. I read "Dream Wedding", electronic pages 512.
April 25: $28. Landed on BL and had to post a vacation photo or tell a story about a vacation.
April 29: $31. Read "Whitethorn Woods", 354 pages Kindle edition, $3.00
April 29: $34. Read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", 256 pages;$3.00.

May 4: $37. Read "The Ghost Brigades" Paperback, 346 pages; $3.00

Once I got past the initial couple of chapters things picked up. Don't love it like book #1, but it's still a four star book.