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40 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Fun but sloppily written military SF, February 22, 2004
I kept saying to myself, 'this is really bad,' every page or so, but I finished the book anyway, so it does have something to recommend it. Good points:
- Good characters, well portrayed.
- Good action scenes.
- A neat technology, 'smart metal,' which lets ships change shape depending on what you need them for. Though we never really see how it happens--we just see before and after.
- The protagonist was probably an alcoholic as a child, something I've never seen done in literature before, but again the camera blinks and we later hear that 'maybe it was just the pills her mother made her take,' and she occasionally has a drink, and except for some angst it doesn't affect her.
- The Palm Pilot equivalents of the future with personalities. It's been done before, but it's handled nicely here. Bad points:
- The title is poor, since Kris is only a mutineer for a few pages, about 350 page into the book.
- The name Longknife is implausible enough, but a kris _is_ a long knife. That's just over the top...
- Enemies are sometimes straw figures. After an initially convincing setup they often roll over and play dead as needed. Allies too--why wouldn't her father, the Prime Minister of her planet, investigate attempts on her life?
- Technology often appears just to do some job, isn't explained, and then goes away.
- In a similar vein, her great-grandfathers are over a hundred and still active, but the longevity situation is never mentioned and there are no other old characters.
- Somewhat muddled politics, only explained gradually over the course of the book.
- The family relationships are also only explained hundreds of pages into the book.
- Both of Kris's paternal grandfathers are named Longknife. Either there's inbreeding going on or it didn't occur to the author how names are handed down.
- Quiet a bit of heavy-handed sermonizing, which I skipped over.
- Lots of minor errors, e.g.,
+ p.297 has Grandpa Ray storming Black mountain instead of Grandpa Trouble
+ we've been told it's the 24th century, but p.319 has a date in the 25th century
+ Kris is described as tall, but on p.364 we're told she weighs 123 pounds. In a nutshell, it's a fun enough read if you don't take it too seriously, but it needed more editing.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
My mixed reaction to a book I enjoyed, June 7, 2009
Other reviews have pointed out some of the sloppiness in the editing and the writing and even occasionally the plotting, which are my reasons for dinging this book a star. Space opera is often driven by a single character, and this particular character is fascinating.
So first, let me lay out my biases. I am a big fan of the early Honor Harrigton books, less so of the later ones (although I read them religiously anyway), and I also like Weber's Shadow of Saganami series, where he follows people who haven't risen to the astronomical heights attained by Honor (and thus are free actually to head out into space and shoot things up). What I loved about the early Honor books is that the twisty plots and the character mesh so nicely. I also love the Liaden books, and consider them to be better written than the Weber books. Lately, I've been enjoying the Alex Benedict books and the USS Merimack books. What these books all have in common is interesting characters who are tossed into situations that call up the best and the worst they have to offer.
This is also the strength of this book. Kris Longknife is a vividly drawn young woman, and unlike many heroes of such novels, she is a realistically young 22-year-old. At the start of the book, she doesn't have a good answer for "Why did you join the Navy?" or more specifically, "Why will you stay in the Navy?" In the course of the book, she finds better answers. She has innate leadership skills, but she hasn't grasped the responsibility of command as deeply as she thinks she has, and the sequences where this is pointed out to her (first rather brutally and later very movingly) are well-designed. What's more, she learns from them, and the Kris who walks out of the book at the end is not the same one who walked in on the first page. She's more mature, and more aware of her own faults, and (maybe most importantly) she understands her family/career situation in a more nuanced way than she did at the start.
The book was an easy fun read, and I'm looking forward to the others in the series.
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24 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Harrington watch your back!, July 29, 2005
Not to be too repetitive but Kris is a better Honor Harrington. I can't help but wonder what I would think of the book without the Honor Harrington series to compare it to. This was more fun and gosh darn it, what's wrong with a main character that's a bit more likable...
Oddly enough, while I enjoyed most of the Honor series, most other military sci-fi leaves me yawning, including other David Weber books. But somehow, the snappy writing and enjoyable characters, boneheads included, make for a book with very few places where you can set it down long enough to grab a cookie.
The Laiden novels probably do a better job at character, of the people and the culture, and might edge this novel down to 4 3/4 stars in comparison, but there are darn few 5 stars on my list to quibble over a tiny margin.
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