82 of 89 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What Storm From the Shadows should have been, June 19, 2010
This review is from: Mission of Honor (Honor Harrington, Book 12) (Hardcover)
Mission of Honor takes place after the events of At All Costs, Storm From the Shadows, and Torch of Freedom. It's the mainline Honor Harrington book after At All Costs, and it delivers. (SPOILER ALERT) At the end of At All Costs, The Battle of Manticore was won by Honor's 8th Fleet, and for all intents and purposes, the war with Haven is over. The question now becomes, how do Manticore and Haven end it- especially with a war looming betwen Manticore and the Solarian League? I think the book does a really good job of showing just how out-of-date the Sollies are, but how desperate the Manticorans are to avoid such a war.
What happens next is probably Weber's best attempt to bring in a 9/11 type event to the Honorverse. Sure, we've seen terror attacks in the Talbott Cluster, and some of the Manticore/Haven battles were epic in scale and casualties. But what happens in Mission of Honor is a complete shift away from what the Honorverse is used to- and it brings about reprecussions- for Mesa, Manticore, Grayson, Old Earth, Haven, and beyond- that will completely redesign the Honorverse.
And through it all, we get the great narration of Honor, Pritchart, and Hamish. What was a great suprise, was to see just HOW much of a leader Queen Elizabeth II really is.
The book ends on both a bombshell and a cliffhanger, and it's the Honor book I've been waiting for. It's got great narration and we're finally learning about what the "Mesan Alignment" is all about. This isn't a case of watching your heroes win the day; it's a case of heroes learning that sometimes, getting back up after a fall is just as hard as the fall in and of itself. But, that's why we read the books! Heartily recommended.
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43 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Honor Disappoints; Weber Needs Good Editors, July 10, 2010
This review is from: Mission of Honor (Honor Harrington, Book 12) (Hardcover)
I've been waiting for this book for a long time, waiting for the cliffhangers which went into motion in "Storm From the Shadows" to finally be resolved. The cliffhangers hung in suspension throughout "Torch of Freedom". Perhaps it's the length of the wait, but when the cliffhangers finally stop hanging, they're anti-climatic, as is this book, a book which has a very truncated feel to it. As someone else has mentioned, this book feels like it was cut in half, and not properly re-written for it's shorter length. This book needed to be either re-written and expanded, or streamlined and shortened. It's an awkward read.
"Mission of Honor" opens with Honor Alexander-Harrington heading to Haven in an effort to finally end the war with Haven by negotiating a peace treaty with Haven. Vice-Admiral Michelle Henke, Countess Gold Peak, is facing an onslaught by a force of 70 Solarian League superdreadnaughts, a threat the reader knows she'll be able to handle due to the enormous tech advantage Manticore currently possesses, but sets up the danger of Manticore possibly getting into a war. But the big threat, a threat no one on Manticore even knows exists, is coming from the Mesan Alignment, a secret attack on the Manticore and Grayson Home systems.
While "Torch of Freedom" finally exposed a great deal about the Mesan Alignment, "Mission of Honor" finally reveals the true nature of the enemy and their long range goals...and yet it's still not clear why a plot aimed at the Solarian League has manipulated Manticore and Haven to be at each other's throats for the last 70+ years. There are still mysteries to be revealed in this series about the new bad guys.
The Solarian attack on the Talbott Cluster ends as expected, but then wastes pages and pages about the problem of taking old-fashioned, heavily manned warships into custody by Manticore vessels which have been modernized to have much smaller crews. If this was foreshadowing for events later on in the series, it's poorly placed, a waste of space.
The attack on the Manticore system is the big event of the book, but it feels very anti-climatic. When compared to time wasted on the problems of prisoners, it really feels diminished. The result of the attack is devastating to Manticore and Grayson, and we lose more cast members. Honor loses family and friends in this attack, but, again, there's a truncated feel to all this. The Harrington clan suffers mightily in this attack, and Honor is again turned into the lethal avatar of vengeance. But there's a problem: While we can understand the heavy loss of family on Honor, the reader has no investment in most of her dead. The attack itself is dealt with all too briefly for the havoc it wrecks upon Manticore and Grayson. Consider: the attack on the Manticore system covers 34 pages; Weber spends 28 pages dealing with TAKING the surrender of the Solarian forces at Spindle. We never even see any of the attack on Grayson.
The conclusion of the book is, however, satisfying, and should come as no surprise, considering that it's been coming since the good guys got in charge on Haven, with Manpower/Mesa shifting to be the true bad guys. It took seven books to get to this point: "War of Honor", "At All Costs", "Mission of Honor" and the four Honorverse novels, but arrive we finally do.
"Mission of Honor" is a hard novel to rate, as it has flaws: It drags at times with unnecessary exposition, and speeds through crucial action sequences. I've said this about the Safehold novels: Weber needs better editors. As has been noted, Honor herself isn't nearly as involved in this novel as in past main-stem novels. No action for Honor. A recurring character is set up to be in the attack on Manticore, but her fate isn't revealed (Ginger Lewis).Yet the finale is indeed satisfying, the Solarian attack on Spindle is well-written, and though too short, the attack on the Manticore system is well written. Queen/Empress Elizabeth gets to shine, we get more details on the Solarians, and the curtain of secrecy over the Mesan Alignment is finally, mostly, lifted. Plus the conclusion of the book finally takes the series off in a long awaited direction. And I love Honor, despite her limited use in this novel. With some reservations, I over-generously give this 4 stars.
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25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Poor start, gets better., July 26, 2010
This review is from: Mission of Honor (Honor Harrington, Book 12) (Hardcover)
Reading the first two thirds of this book is a boring chore. It's all recap and exposition that could have been done MUCH better with a 30 page "Previously In The Honorverse" overview. I really can't think of ANYTHING before the Battle at Spindle that was not covered in previous books.
Obviously, writers can create a successful novel that re-presents a previous plot but from a different point of view. Unfortunately, this is at least the fourth Honorverse novel with an overlapping time-line, and the same characters. Things are not just moving ahead slowly, they are crawling. And to fill in the pages there is padding where minor characters do unimportant things. In one scene, we follow a team of marines through a captured ship, from the airlock to the bridge. Nothing happens. They don't even encounter any casualties. Why was this in the book?
Once we get to the execution of operation "Oyster Bay", an event that was first explicitly mentioned three novels ago, this book finally picks up its pace, and becomes worth reading. We finally get big revelations about the "Real Enemy" behind the war(s) of the series, and even a surprise resolution or two.
If you pick up this book, do yourself a favor and skip right to chapter Twenty-Two, (page 286 in the hardcover) you won't be missing anything.
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