the thing with tal bauer books, i think, and i'm not sure if this is a problem? or a preference thing: too much detail. my mans was going at it, detailing every single thing in the war, the submarine happenings, every place and thing got a description of its own in a way that my eyes swam over the page and i was so anxious to get to what was actually happenings, the mysteries, that i skipped a bunch of paragraphs.

this is something i try very hard not to do, sometimes i read so much that i get anxious and distracted and either skip parts or downright don't absorb them.

THAT being said!!! i absolutely LIVED for sasha and sergei, i didn't care as much about adam and faisal (tho they're sweet) and i adored how jack and ethan's love was stable and growing steadier by the day, so MAN was i invested in sasha and sergey, i was suffering for not having a clear idea how sergey looked or even his exact age, i cared so much about him!!! this is something that made me pertty frustated, i had a good idea how everyone else looked, kinda making up the ones that we didn't have acurate descriptions, but my man sergey deserved better.

i kinda suck at this review thing, but i just wanna write up my thoughts for myself, so bear with me.

also man, i was tired of SUFFERING for a while there!!! everything went wrong alllll the tiiiime and i just wanted to see things RESOLVED!! but man this series got me feeling a lot of things, even like, PAIN!!! which is something that can make me drop a book like it's scalding hot. it was just like pulling a thorn out, it hurts as hell, but you can't look away. wait that sounds bad. i don't mean this necessarily in a bad way. i just don't like to suffer while reading, ok? but i was invested, i was entertained, there was no way in hell i was not gonna drop this.

and bauer is pretty damn impressive writer and researcher, not to mention he self-publishes, so i gotta say that i think this is the best self-published series i've ever seen in terms of editorial work, research, and consistency. it could've gone lighter on the details (the reason this wasn't a 5 star read for me), but i have mAD respect for bauer and will probably read more stuff from him in the future.