This was a strong start to the Babanango series, it had everything that I was looking for and enjoyed from other books like this. The characters were everything that I was looking for and enjoyed how well they felt in this universe. DJG Palmer has a great writing style and left me wanting more.

Reading this book is an exercise in finding the story in a morass of words. Even then, it wasn't something I found satisfying.

Too much time is spent describing things, people, places, not letting everything unfold as characters experienced them. This, and data dumping, distanced me from the writing and certainly made it hard to care about the two principal characters, Lt Albert Bond and Sapper Jack Coleman. In part, this book is billed as a queer romance. I'm all for queering history (this time the Boer War). Yet all that the author offers is a damp squib which is all the more frustrating because neither character is fleshed out. How are they queer? What have their experiences been? How does that feed into their current situation? We're given all sorts of detail about their lives so far (see the data dumping above) yet none of it really feeds into convincing, flesh and blood characters who we care about, follow the progress of and are the reason to continue reading.

Disappointing.