Review: Cadia Stands

Cadia Stands by Justin D. Hill
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Summary: I will be frank, this book was a severe disappointment to me. Maybe I just came to it with the wrong expectations, maybe I am not really the target for this kind of book. Anyway, the fact remains that there is very little I find memorable in this book. There are no great descriptions, no great characters, no great dialogue, no great prose. The author just throws names and explosions and disjointed scenes with recurring characters that are minimally developed and calls the job done. It tries to paint the very grim picture of Cadia's fall, but somehow it manages to paint all the epic fighting and doomed resistance in an amazingly boring light.

Prose: The book is written in an astonishingly dry fashion. The author really doesn't spend any time being descriptive. He goes briskly about painting the barest hints of scene, then proceeds onto the events, narrating them with equal briskness. For the first half of the book we are mostly treated to disjointed vignettes of characters used to show us the progress of the war, but again, the author goes about this in a way that feels almost perfunctory, not memorable in the least. 2/5

Plot: The plot is literally the doomed, grimdark resistance and ultimate fall of Cadia as seen through a handful of hardly-developed characters. None of which is told in a particularly memorable manner. I mean, take the pylons. They are introduced as important to the standing of the Cadian Gate, but the plot opts instead for a diabolus ex machina destruction instead of properly integrating the pylons more directly into the fall of the planet. As it is they are completely left by the wayside. Really, I feel like the whole plot is an excuse to write numerous vaguely interconnected after-reports set on the Warhammer 40k universe. 2/5

Pacing: As mentioned, the book is really brisk, it never lingers too much on any character or even on any particular event, and as such most of everything lacks any kind of emotional impact. 1/5

Characterization: I'd hazard to call what we have in the book more viewpoints than characters. Obviously, they are characters, but none of them are particularly developed, they all have the same basic drive and behave in basically the same fashion, effectively making it very easy for one to blend into the other. 2/5

World-building: The book does a half-hearted attempt at painting an image of what life is like on Cadia. I think it fails, much like most of the rest of the book, because as mentioned above the prose is brisk and dry, and it never really stops being so. The meager information feels like you are reading an exceptionally boring tourist brochure for an imaginary place. 2/5

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