Isolation, Part I of The War For Rath

Isolation is an amazing science fiction novel taking place in the future. It is part one of The War for Rath. In this story, Jason Hawkins travels to the future searching for answers about the mysterious death of his brother. However, the future was not what he expected, and he found himself in the middle of a war. Jason is captured by the Zarr, who believe that he is an ESPO agent. He is promised that he can return home after the war, and he joins the Zarr in battling the ESPO. He becomes part of a fighter squadron, and later a special forces unit. I really enjoyed reading this book. The setting was pretty cool, it takes place in the Iron City, which has been partially destroyed by war. The ESPO controls most of the city, while the Zarr has a hidden base from which they launch raids. I also like some of the technology in the book, such as the Zarr watches and the R-95 fighters. There was also the Ice Fire, a device that could extract information from the minds of people, or rewrite their minds so they would be loyal to the ESPO. The Zarr made destroying the Ice Fire one of their top priorities. I really liked all of the different characters. All of the pilots had unique personalities and backgrounds, which made the squadron more interesting. It was also interesting to see how Jason impacted the rest of the squadron when he joined. I also liked it when Jason got the pilots to stop fighting with the ground unit they were combining with. The chapters that weren’t about Jason really helped with the overall story, especially the ones about Jack, Drake Braken, or Agent 133. One of the most interesting things to me was the difference in the information that the characters knew. The ESPO had taken all historical archives from the public, so the Zarr didn’t have much information from before the war. Jason, on the other hand, knew a lot about the past, but nothing about the future, or about the war, until he arrived. There were a few things that weren’t resolved, but those will probably be resolved in part two. Overall, this was an amazing book. It was well written, and I really enjoyed reading it. I would recommend this book to kids in high school that enjoy science fiction novels.