This is a review of the book "Day One" and all of this is personal view and opinion.
Firstly, I have done a bit of trolling through the masses of cheap e-books available and I have to say that the one I bought was considerably lower in quality than Day One. It is hard to sort out if even free is worth it in many cases but this e-book was worth the price of admission. In terms of grammar, spelling and formating I don't recall seeing anything that stood out as errors or issues. The book is well written, grammatically correct and properly formated for an e-book reader. So if you are wondering if you are paying for schlock I can assure you the author put some effort into the book.
The story is about day one of a war between the outer colonies and earth. The bulk of the book is actually background material about how the conflict came to be. Here is where the problem may come up for some people. A lot of it is like reading a history text, I think the authors intent was such but it may not be everyones cup of tea. It reads like the plotting C.J. Cherryh does for her future earth series and is often times fairly dry. As I read books on WW2 for enjoyment I didn't mind these parts at all. They were well done, I thought the build up to the war parts were logical and had no obvious plot holes in them. I do find the fact there is any conflict at all a bit harder to follow. But regardless, the author doesn't make the error I've seen in the past of using the book to make thinly veiled political-economic statements. I have to admit that for me is about the fastest turn off there exists. His portrayal of the politics and such rings true, and you can see how the whole situation got to where it did. Basically the background material leaves no gaps you can maneuver a DDG through.
The characters suffer one real problem. That is the story is told from many points of view so each person in the book is only given a short time in front of the reader. In several cases they don't even survive that short exposure. This makes it hard to judge them. The one thing I noticed though was that there were no obvious idiots in the bunch. The attack plan works not because the one side is composed of buffoons who could not find their ass with both hands and a navigation system but because they had no reason to expect an attack. But because each character is in front of the camera for what amounts to a short time it is hard to say that these are people you will care about. I expect that "Day Two" needs to really work on this. As it stands they are human, interesting, and believable.
The battle and technology is realistic. Many may find that a bit boring, but it is refreshing to see. I take exception to the minimal number of CISW on a ship like a cruiser. Basically all ships seemed to have 2 rail and 2 laser systems outside of the ships designed for antimissile close defence (there is a ship listing and details in the appendix of the book). To me this is a bit strange, given how lethal combat is, I'd have expected a higher emphasis on final close in defence. Otherwise I enjoyed the battle scene in the book.
Pacing, again may be an issue. After the first section the book changes to the textbook format to give the background. These are a lot more like an After Action Report then a novel. So the middle parts of the book are a bit slow going, then it picks back up again for the end. It does seem to end at the end of day 1, so it is a cliff hanger and I have to admit felt rather abrupt.
I enjoyed the book, and look forward to day 2. I've read far worse first novels over the years and this one certainly seems far superior to any of the cheap e-books I've seen. I suspect pretty much anyone on this board would enjoy the book. Wider audiences is harder to judge as it is "hard" science fiction rather than space opera or science fantasy. I would say that if you enjoy C.J. Cherryh you are likely to enjoy this book as well. It is obviously the result of a lot of hard work, and for a first novel it is of high enough quality to put the author on the buy another book list for me.