Burndive is a story of a traumatized boy growing up, and a hope that a long war is coming to an end. I read this without reading Warchild first, so I might be missing some context, but it seemed to make sense. There's a lot going on in this book, and it's fun and fast moving, but has some major structural flaws which I'm going to gripe about.

The first is the protagonist, Ryan Azarcon, child of privilege, child of a broken home, and traumatized survivor of bombings and assassination attacks. Ryan starts out in a bad place: depressed, angry, using drugs and trying to destroy everything around him. Generally, we know that the story is going to be about Ryan growing up and finding himself. that's what stories about 19 year old boys are about. And towards the end, there's some great stuff about old wounds healing and breaking preconceptions, but I'm not sure Ryan earns it. He's too smart and perceptive to be an unreliable narrator, and too mean for me to like.

Second is the FTL and the war. I'm a bit of a nut about the relationship between transit and governance, but I'm not sure that I buy that the ships, stations, and drives implied in the setting would give the plentiful pirates the setting entails. Basically, space is big, pirates need to intercept and board their targets, and FTL ships should just be able to leap away. It probably makes sense somewhere, and most people won't care, but I wasn't able to link up the politics, economics, and technology of the setting in my head.

Third is the Send, the omnipresent news network that invades Ryan's life again and again. His mother is a PR officer, and he has a tempestuous relationship with the news and it's combination of warmongering and celebrity gossip. Since this novel came out in 2003, I think this is a commentary about cable news and the War on Terror, but it could be a lot more pointed, or a lot darker. The divide between the Earth centered Send community, and the personal ties that define the ship-bound pirate culture could have been brought forward more.

There is some other stuff which readers may like or dislike according to their whims. Minor minus was the neologisms. For example, computer hacking is called 'Burndiving' for no apparent reason. Interestingly, this book is also super bi. Ryan has seems to prefer females, but has no problem hitting on men and being hit on in return. Again, I can't tell if it's deliberate or yaoi, but it's a neat point.

So if I griped so much, why four stars? Well, I had a lot of fun reading it, and if the pieces didn't quite come together the way I wanted them to, the individual sentences were really good, enough so to convince me to check out the first book.