I liked this a lot. This is not a romance at all. I think it's classic sci-fi with a little paranormal thrown in. There are no sex scenes. Though Johnson's audience is usually adult, I think this would be good YA fiction as well.

The heroine, Ia, is a young girl, barely an adult, whose paranormal vision of her duty leads her into the military. We are not given a precise description of the nature of the disaster she is working to avert, only a view of the results of the disaster. Her paranormal abilities must be hidden in order for her to succeed. Sometimes it seems as if they give her superpowers.

The rest of the story is a great war tale. We are taken through the boot camp of the future, shown a bit about the military's rationale for its training methods and how leaders are created. The entire book is told from the heroine's point of view in the third person. Some of the chapter lead-ins are flash-forward in nature. The relationships with the secondary characters are a bit sketchy, and the tone gets a bit preachy when implying how we ought to regard our own military personnel. Other than those minor quibbles, the author did an excellent job telling the story.

The plot unravels along many fascinating paths. I liked the action scenes, they were very fast-paced and vividly drawn. (view spoiler)[One of my favorite scenes is when the squad is working to rescue flood victims, and the dam bursts. Ia uses her knowledge of the immediate future in order to successfully surf the destructive wave, then she is leaping from log to log like a lumberjack. (hide spoiler)]

I think this is a keeper, I want to read it again just before the sequel comes out. An Officer's Duty