Revenge is Best Served Hot: For young adults with emphasize on “young”.

Revenge is Best Served Hot (Nemesis #1) by Saxon Andrew
My rating: 6 out of 10 stars

Two genetically modified human babies have been taken to the Choten-Zan Monastery to be raised to adulthood. The ancient priests have agreed to teach them their best hand-to-hand combat techniques and develop their speed and reflexes. The two children are sent away on their eighteenth birthday with a small warship and space armor that was left for them by the one that delivered them to the Zan.

That’s all they received when they left the Monastery… and they do not know who they are or where they were born. They kidnap a Werstag Engineer on a planet where they are attacked by hundreds of Yellow Armored Warriors. He tells them that they are a species called human and that their attackers are from a civilization that destroyed their home world. Grant and Cinny decide that Earth’s destroyers must pay for their crime. But first they have to find an invincible warship named Orion’s Sword to make that happen.

The Werstag tells them that they were created to be the Orion’s pilots and the Yellow Species knows the danger they represent. It’s a race to see if the Raiders can kill the two before they find the most powerful warship in the universe.

When I picked up reading again which, I am almost ashamed to write, was only about three years ago, Saxon Andrew’s Love Conquers All and the Annihilation series was one of the first ones that I picked up and I have since read a lot of his books. Since some time I stopped reading them though since they started to feel very repetitive and a wee bit too much for the younger audiences for my taste. Indeed, these books are clearly young adult material and thus they are quick and simple reads with little in terms of character building not to mention actual science. I still liked them due to their gung-ho adventures and very positive spirit but after reading this latest one I wonder if I would have liked them as much if I would heave read them today or if it was just lack of reading experience that made me like them then.

I think I would probably still have liked his previous books today. Maybe not so much as I did then though. However, there are some major differences between this book and his earlier works that makes me feel less happy with this book. First of all, this book feels much more young adult, downright childish, than what I remembered from Saxon Andrews and the story is partly rather silly actually. Second and more importantly the story is quite dark. Those who we are lead to believe from the start are the good guys are actually not that good at all and at the end of the book a rather dark and depressing picture have been painted. Not wanting to spoil the book by revealing to much but I have to mention that the role of the humans is not a flattering one. Much of the spirit that made me like previous books by Saxon Andrew are gone and left is a superficial and rather childish book I am afraid.