Instruct: Classify a given review as either positive or negative.
Query: A huge disappointment

Having read and enjoyed all of Ms Meluch's previous books, I was very happy to learn that she had written a new one. Unfortunately, the long hiatus since her last book appears to have had a terrible effect upon her as an author. This book was an enormous disappointment; a meretricious farrago with characterisation that makes the average film of algae look substantial, lazy plotting and lazier world-building, amounting to a caricature of the stalest tropes of the military space opera genre.I might have accepted this in a satire, but unfortunately it wasn't funny either. To readers who want action, originality, humour, logical extrapolation of world from artifact and plot from character, and characters that are people rather than sock-puppets, I recommend Lois McMaster Bujold.