A solid 4.5 stars.

Jacqs is offensive and ignorant and kind of an asshole. I loved him against my will. He is based on the character of Jayne from Firefly, a hypermasculine man who is uneducated but has developed high survival skills because of his shitty, shitty life.

Jacqs makes homophobic and sexist remarks consistently, which is initially very off-putting. However, through the narrative, we see that much of his derogatory language is tangled in his ignorance of sexuality. For example: thinking that hypersexual women have sex with everyone , whereas (in this society) it is defined as someone requiring sexual intimacy as a way to know someone before entering into any sort of relationship. Jacqs feels singled out as undesirable when Allie Grah (a hypersexual navigator on his ship) doesn't want anything to do with him and it bothers him more than the usual standard rejection, of which he can seemingly take with ease. The same is true of men who enjoy sex with other men - his deprived childhood in the overrun refugee camps gained him many experiences of seeing men being truly awful to others sexually and it colored his viewpoint. Jacqs is not the type of person to seek out new information; if it happened in front of him, he takes it as rote fact.

Enter Zeke, his new commanding officer, who is a true war hero. Someone with prescence and experience, someone Jacqs can respect, as the only other frontline veteran on the ship he has been banished to. He is also pansexual, which confuses Jacqs, who has a pretty terrible image of such sexualities in his head. Zeke has a predatory grace that draws Jacqs in, even if he doesn't quite peg it as attraction at first. Once the ball gets rolling on Jacqs' introspection, we see that his prejudices were mostly personal dislike. He didn't hate Lt. Taylor because he was registed as homosexual, but because he was a whiny pissant. Once pushed into thinking about it, Jacqs looks beyond Zeke and realizes there are other men fitting his criteria who he would gladly, as he says, "knock boots with"(thankfully, that takes Turbulence out of the "gay-for-you" genre). Jacqs just has a competency kink, y'all.

Sidenote: there are several instances in Zeke and Jacqs' interactions where Zeke would look as if he wanted to say something, but think better of it. This usually happened when Jacqs laid out his honest opinion on something. I would love to see this whole story from Zeke's POV.

Oh, by the way, there's an war going on between humans and some creepy ass alien species. That's kinda important too, I guess. Turbulence truly had a bittersweet ending - Jacqs and Zeke were attempting to prepare themselves emotionally for their inevitable separation. They knew Zeke would be recalled to the front after his "officer experience" training was complete. Instead,

the war ends (and not in humanity's favor) and they become well-treated slaves on a mining planet.

But hey! They're together, right?