Random Babblings

Ashes of Victory. Not having review any of the other books here I’ll go into some more general feeling of the series. As I had said, fantasy had been my forte for a while but I wanted a change of pace. The Honor Harrington series has been that for the most part. While I’m not known for stopping the reading of a book because I don’t like it, I have no problems stopping reading a series, so the fact that I’m up to book nine says something.

The Honorverse as it is called is a series of Science Fiction war stories, mostly space battles, but the political and individual stories that go behind them as well. The main character is Honor Harrington a commander in the Royal Manticoran Space Navy. The series mostly follows her progression though the war, and her rise through her birth nation and a local allied nations navies.

By Ashes of Victory, Honor is an Admiral in the RMN and due to some injuries sustained in the previous books is working as an instructor at the navies Officer School. This represented a great shift in the series. For the first time 90% of the action of the book does not involve the lead character. To that point over half of the book doesn’t even include her. Even further the list of “lead” characters is somewhat long.

I don’t usually have a problem with multi-lead books, but this time I did. I’m not sure if it was a sense of disconnect, for eight books we’ve had one lead character with the occasional aside for some other characters or other settings. Now we have the traditional multiple leads, and switch perspective between them every chapter or so. I think one of the problems, is that some of these characters just weren’t strong enough. Most of these new “leads” were the supporting role characters that we’ve seen and heard from every now and then, but their personalities weren’t strengthened into lead characters. Not enough to turn me off, but enough to reduce my enthusiasm for the book.

Overall I’d rate this as a 3/5. For the moment though I’m going to set aside the series, but I’ll be back soon.

Next up: Hinterland: Book Two of the Godslayer Chronicles