Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆
The synopsis starts, “It’s been 100 years since the inter-galactic organization known as PULSE intervened to liberate the women of Earth. Now purged of its male population, the women have embarked on a journey to take their place in the all-female cosmic society.” Wait, what? That seems quite the “previously…” to skip over completely. It is a lightly-sketched universe, and one which perhaps raises more questions than it answers, not least the implication that every solar system has the same concepts of “male” and “female” as we do.
Anyway, taking that as read, the spearhead of this trans-galactic Amazonian army are PULSE, which is short for the Planetary Union of Life-form Salvation and Emancipation. Becoming a PULSE officer is not for the faint of heart, requiring years of training, which culminate in the infamously brutal final test of the title. In this case, the graduating class are dropped on an undeveloped planet, and have to make their way across its surface, to where a ship is programmed to depart at a preset time. But quite intentionally, it’s a thoroughly unforgiving landscape, to the point of lethality. Every step seems to bring a new threat, from native fauna through deliberate traps to the worst of them all – the Huntress, a PULSE dropout whose apparent mission is to ensure the final graduation ceremony can take place in a phone-booth.
After the initial couple of chapters set the scene, it’s almost non-stop action once we reach the planet’s surface, as we follow the paths of a (dwindling) number of candidates. The main focus is on two aspiring PULSE officers, Stella and Faye, who have become a team over their training, using their respective strengths to buttress each other’s weaknesses. But how will they cope after being separated? And what about the other candidates, such as top of the class Miriyada, or Kandis, who was curiously absent for most classes?
It’s a bit odd how some of the women seem keen on sabotaging other candidates. If it were “first 10 to finish graduate”, this might make sense, but everyone who reaches the ship passes, and I’d have said you’d want to encourage co-operation among potential officers. The level of bitchy backstabbing seen here, seems more like high-school than a military institution. There are also a few occasions when Crawford doesn’t have a very good handle on describing the action. For instance, a fight on the side of a mountain takes place; beyond that, I’ve still no real idea what was going on. And it might have been nice to take advantage of having a galaxy to work with, and add more diversity to the candidates; they all seem a bit… humanoid.
On the other hand, I can’t argue with the pace at all: this is one of the most page-turning stories I’ve read in the last year. I wanted to know what happens next, and the clear sense of “anyone can die at any time” created a genuine sense of threat for the remaining characters. The strictly gynocentric approach here leaves no room at all for romance – the bane of the literary genre as far as I’m concerned – so I appreciated that. These positive aspects did a good job of countering the flaws noted above, and although the ending is less cliff-hanger than brick wall, I’d not be averse to seeing where things go from here.
Author: R.A. Crawford
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform, available through Amazon as an e-book or paperback.
Book 1 of 2 in the PULSE series.