HONOR KEEPS HER PROMISE
The Solarian League—for hundreds of years they have borne the banner of human civilization. But the bureaucratic Mandarins who rule today's League are corrupt and looking for scapegoats. They've decided the upstart Star Kingdom of Manticore must be annihilated.
UNCOMPROMISING COURAGE
Honor Harrington has worn the Star Kingdom's uniform for half a century. Very few know war the way Honor Harrington does. So far, hers has been a voice of caution. But now the Mandarins have committed atrocities such as the galaxy has not known in a thousand years. They have finally killed too many of the people Honor Harrington loves.
UNCOMPROMISING VENGEANCE
Now Honor Harrington is coming for the Solarian League. And Hell is riding in her wake.
UNCOMPROMISING HONOR
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Well, okay...It starts very slowly, and never really gets flowing. Lots of little story ends that never get tied up -- like, what's the significance of Harahap's capture, exactly? It doesn't add to the story. The battles are samey, the supposedly tender home scenes don't sparkle, there's way too much info dumping during otherwise useless conferences. And then suddenly we get a bit of resolution at the end of the book.
So I dunno... I guess there should be another sequel to tie up the Alignment angle, but whether I'm looking forward to it, is an open question.Posted on
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Still feels unfinished10th Fleet/Mesa needs a seperate Trilogy
Bob
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Should have been 50% smallerThere are several good space battles there, but there is so much unnecessary filler there that the book could have been literally 50% smaller and it would not have lost anything from the story. Also if this is really the last HH book there are a lot of unfinished story lines that go nowhere.
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Good enough but only just.Its entertaining enough and its a fairly tidy ending but, essentially, it's half a book of exactly what we want (ship battles, fast-paced stories, Honour Harrington and infodumps on technical specs) and half a book of all the padding and repetition we've been reading for the past 3-4 releases.
I've been reading HH since #1 and I think, somewhere, in all the 'cast of thousands' BS that cropped in, the author forgot what made us love the books in the first place... Honor Harrington doing what she does best. The last third of the book is almost exactly something from those halcyon days. Its just a shame we have to wade deep through other people's advertures to get there.
I'm really not interested in the grand adventures of Damien freaking Harahap.
I'm glad this journey's over and i'll forever be thankful for Weber writing these stories, even if this is where we finally part ways.Posted on
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Superior.Worth every penny. If you've been following the series for the last few books, you have been looking forward to this one. I was not disappointed. Starships blow up; hearts are broken; bad guys get whats coming to them.
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Hooray!All Honor novels contain at least three elements. (1) Weapons specs (2) People explaining the plot to each other, often in the form of staff meetings (3) Gripping, hard-fought battles where death is a constant possibility and the distinction between the good guys and the bad guys is crystal clear. (3) is what I for one come here for, and this novel has a gratifyingly high percentage of it versus (1) and (2).
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Back to FormDavid Weber returns to the form which made the Honor Harrington series so satisfying.
The action and plot advancement it encompasses help make the lack of both in the immediately prior 'Book That Shall Not Be Named', nothing but a distant memory.
An enjoyable, worthy and important part of the series.Posted on
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Someone finally rescued David Weber and we got our exploding spaceships back.
Amazing battles, with new tactics not considered in prior books. Super fun read.
Unlike the last book, the random characters are not the whole story, they just add a nice bit of flavor.
And did I mention exploding spaceships? Oh my!Posted on
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Quality Honorverse, not quite what I'd hoped for.The last time a novel in this universe was published, it jumped backwards two years or more and, while its content was well-written, it was about 90% rehashed scenario. My comment at the time was that Weber was badly in need of an editor.
I don't know the inside scoop on the production of this book, but it looks to me like quality Honorverse edited down to a slightly rough skeleton of a story. Where the last book had tens and tens of thousands of words effectively in the wrong place, this one feels like it could use another 30k or 50k words to flesh out some of the things that it doesn't show us. The entire book feels somewhat ragged, with events not quite fitting together both internally and with previous novels. This may be a feature, rather than a bug - a deliberate point of verisimilitude as events in the real world rarely connect perfectly - but compared with the mass of previous content in the series it doesn't quite work. A couple of threads get dropped, even within this novel. One of them I hope will feed into another ground-level Mesa novel, but that's hardly assured. And character development for Honor in the last two "months" of the book is a mess. At the very least there should have been a cabinet-level planning scene between the Beowulf scenario and the final scenario to flesh out what is happening in her head rather than just dumping straight into the "In Fury Born" riff. ...and then the last two beats in her personal arc are just ugly. Another review below has spoiled one of them but I'll refrain from saying more than that the retcon makes my spleen hurt.
I'm also harboring some irritation that in the end, they did the thing that they said they couldn't do over and over again throughout the series. I think we all knew it would probably end up there anyway, but if you're going to violate the fundamental strategic principles you've fleshed out over decades of writing, at least give the readers a reason.
A more minor problem is that suddenly the stealth Alignment graser torps are a valid threat again? And with no prior live data they can find all the defense control nodes? If they're as good as written, then why didn't they just Yawata 2 straight up? And some kind of explanation for how Technodyne has all these gadgets in the pipeline (full mass production of a major upgrade and effectively a new weapon system since the Filareta wipeout) would make things work better.
I'm hoping this is one of the rare cases where the eARC does get some serious revision before the final publication. It doesn't happen often but particularly Weber books seem to mutate on occasion.
Which is all a lot of grousing, but I genuinely did enjoy the book. It is a rousing and plausible finale to the general arcs since the end of the Haven wars. It doesn't drill down too deeply into pointless sidestories or backwaters. It would be an excellent place to stop the series if Weber were inclined to do so... though it's also pretty clear that there is more content in his series outline. I wish that these books got the level of loving detail which his Safehold series has over the last decade, but I'm happy that this book has finally appeared.Posted on
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ReturnPassed on the last couple earcs. Glad I didn't on this one
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