With apologies to the author and editor and publisher, but this title was incredibly off-putting. I think I got this as part of a bundle of women writing SF; there is no way I would ever have bought it, thanks purely to the title – I figured it was going to be something about a dog?

Anyway. The title is accurate to the story when you get reading, but I don’t think that’s a defence. So let me assure you: this is not a story about a dog trying to be a soldier. In fact, the spots refer to a cat (which I found very odd, but whatever).

The other thing you should know going on is that this is not written like a regular novel. It’s more like a play script: it’s almost entirely dialogue, with a note for who’s speaking but rarely any information about how they’re speaking. There are italicised comments about the actions happening around some of the dialogue, but it’s very sparse compared to most narratives. There’s even some bits that are described as montages, hammering the film-like nature home. If this is not going to be your thing, definitely don’t go here.

This is a military SF novel: you also don’t want to read it if you don’t like Stormship Troopers-level killing rate of the alien enemy. There is a LOT of killing. Mostly the deaths are robot-esque, mindless bug-ish aliens, but still – it got pretty overwhelming. So again, may not be everyone’s cup of tea.

The titular Spots has just been transferred to a new outfit to help out with an ongoing war against these alien bugs. She’s not really physically ready for it, and only just ready mentally. The outfit she’s joined is desperately low on numbers, and is facing increasing problems from the alien threat that no one had really expected in this area. So there’s friction with her joining them; there’s friction from lack of sleep and overwhelming stress; there’s friction because there’s an alien ally on base that not everyone trusts. There’s a lot of angry people going around.

One thing I found interesting was that I often lost track of who was male or female, with the exception of Spots, who is a mother. The characters go by call-signs that have nothing to do with their own names, so every now and then there’s some comment about she or he and I was surprised by who it referred to. Also, from passing comments, it’s clear that the soldiers are from a mixture of races, although I’m not sure there was a mixture of nationalities – exactly who was sponsoring this military was unclear.

I enjoyed this more than I had expected; I started reading it because I wanted to either read it or just clear it off my to-be-read ebook pile. While I didn’t love the high body-count, I was intrigued by the dynamics between many of the characters, and amused by the **** for the profanity.