Specifically, over all much of the whole setting felt too contrived for me. In general it felt as if the author wanted to write a book about 'gifted children' and how they may be used and manipulated in a war, but to me it seemed that the setting was manipulated to make the premise seem possible (where a two wars had occurred and a third one was suspected imminent, but enough time occurred between them to set up a system where gifted children were selected and trained to be mankind's possible savior).
Overall, through the 1st 2/3rds of the story I just kept having the question pop up in the back of my mind "why?". Why was it assumed that only a child would be mankind's savior? Why were the children training in personal combat, in an arena with walls and such that they could bounce off of, for battles in deep space between vessels where there would be no such walls? Why were the children so smart (selective parenting, genetic manipulation, etc)?
In addition though, the story really hit into two areas that I have a lot of discomfort with. The first deals with treating certain people/children as being so gifted that they are almost superhuman and the second dealing with they way that these children (some as young as 6 years old) seem to at times being portrayed as someone a fair bit older than they were.
With regards to the 1st issue, it appeared to me that the whole concept of space battles etc really kind of made the lives, thoughts, and actions of anyone who wasn't a "gifted child" commander irrelevant, and there didn't appear to be any thought that anyone outside that small cliché could have anything of value to add or insights to provide.
With regards to the 2nd issue, to me at least it seems that a 6 year old is still very young (only recently starting school and such) and as such probably is still very early in his or her development of interpersonal skills etc. Yet in the story many of the children seem to act and react more like what you might expect from an older adolescent, teenager or even adult. In that respect a lot of the story just didn't ring true for me, and in general the story felt more like a work of "fantasy" than science fiction. To me the story could have just as easily been about wizards and unicorns or dragons, and it wouldn't have felt any more or less "real" or "believable" to me. Overall, I guess the premise and setting and such had already caused me to have suspended my sense of disbelief that it wouldn't have made any real difference to me.
[As a slight aside, there were several parts in the book that I was reminded of an episode of the "Simpsons" where Lucy Lawless - from the TV show Xena - was appearing at a comic book convention. Whenever someone asked her about some apparent discrepancy in one of the episodes from Xena she just replied "Um, ... that was because, um ... a Wizard did it", which seemed like a good catchall explanation for every thing that otherwise might not make sense.
To me though in this book, whenever I came across something that just didn't seem to ring true to me or when a character seemed to behave much differently to me than a 6 to 12 year old kid might, the thought that ran through my mind instead was "well um, ...they did that because, um... because they're "gifted" or "wonder babies" or something like that".]
In the end I tend to be very uncomfortable with books, TV shows, and commercials or the like where there seems to be some need to treat children as just little adults (or younger children as just smaller older children). To me a kid is a kid, and much of what they know and feel and how they act and interact may well be just as much "nurture" as "nature" and just because a kid may have a high IQ or maybe even have been genetically manipulated or something doesn't mean that they aren't still little kids in many ways, still developing, learning, and understanding, and as such I'd suspect that they would probably behave accordingly.
Anyway, as I noted above, I don't think it was necessarily a bad book or anything bet it was definitely not one that I particularly cared for on many, many levels.
