Customer Reviews

Mutineer (Kris Longknife)

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I love Elizabeth Moon's space navy books for their excellent characters and great politics and battles. In Kris Longknife: Mutineer, Mike Shepherd visits similar territory, but the Longknife family runs the place, and Kris's family are in the history books and sometimes in her parent's house (her great grandfathers are still alive and kicking). Kris is young, smart, and most important, she pays attention.

I enjoyed this book immensely, and am looking forward to the next one. (I wonder what Mike's title was; this title sounds more like marketing than anything else.)

Kristine Longknife is your typical prime ministers daughter, billionaire in her own right, member of a extreamly weathy-powerful multi-generational family, and navy ensign. This books is the beginning of Kris's adventures as old family enemies come to try and finish what they started when Kris was a young girl.

The story itself in a interesting one and a fun read. But there are so many inconsistancies; name changes, tense changes, several places the word "a" or "an" is missing, there are spelling errors of the most basic sort and etc, that they take away from the punch of the story. Oh don't get me wrong this is a fun read but it could have used some serious proof editing.

Kris has spent much of her life trying to avoid her mothers plans to turn her into a lady, the usless sort of lady. So Kris joins the navy and carries on the tradition of being one of those "damn Longknives!"

The story is interesting, and the world in which the story is told is interesting. I even thought that the politics that drove the world were well crafted.

The characters are pretty decent as well. I'm not going to call Kris Longknife another Honor Harrington by a long shot, but there are moments where she is very likable.

But the writing.... my god, the descriptive writing is weak and awkward. And the dialogue was equally awkward until I started imagining everyone talking with stiff upper crust British accents. Even then, there are a few conversations in the book (especially when the Highlanders show up) which I just could not stand to read for more than 2 minutes at a time because they were so cheesy.

I might give the second book a chance to see if the writer improves any and find out where the over-all story goes... but my advice for anyone considering this book is to wait until you don't have anything better to read, and then give it a chance if you're desperate.

I bought this book together with Tanya Huff's "A Confederation of Valor" and I thoroughly enjoyed Confederation of Valor. Sadly, the same cannot be said for Kris Longknife's book.

I fully admit I did not read the whole book. In fact, I only read the first fifteen pages. I just found the main character to be weak and the constant flashbacks to be, well, unconducive to good reading. I understand she's young, scared, has hangups about her history. But when she's in the middle of a mission and she's having these wimpy italised moments, I just want to roll my eyes and skip forward.

There are many reviewers who did enjoy this book, and the fact that there are many more in this series shows many people out there do like this book. I'm just being honest and putting my 2 cents on the table.

I had heard so much about this series that I'm glad I finally got around to reading the first book. This military science fiction novel seemed to contain at least 3 novels in one as we follow Kris Longknife, a 'boot' ensign, along her first military assignments. The first mission starts out with a bang as Kris heads up a dangerous kidnapping assignment that kicks off the start of a mystery potentially connected to Kris's own past. Her second assignment lands Kris squarely in the middle of a humanitarian aid mission on a bandit infested planet and then finally Kris is involved in a space battle that opens up an inter planetary political mess the size of a gas giant.

Kris is not the gritty protagonist of other military science fiction works such as say Ripley from Aliens although neither is she a bubble head. I thought this book was fun and fast but yet tackled many serious subjects such as post traumatic stress, survivor guilt, and even alcohol abuse. We watch Kris mature through her mission assignments and at the same time she tries to unlock not only the mysteries of the galaxy but her own seemly related interlocking mysteries of her own family dynamics.

Note: Although I'm reading the 2nd novel in the series in print, and so far it is just as good, I listened to Mutineer on audio books. The voice actress did an amazing job and it seemed like there were at least 30 characters in which to differentiate. It sure made a long drive go fast!

I found this book to be good entertainment and decent sci-fi military fiction. It kept me occupied for four hours.

The main character, Kris Longknife, starts out as a fresh ensign. As the book goes on, Kris has many experiences. She learns more about herself and why she's in the Navy.

Some things I didn't like about the story: In some places I found it hard to follow scene changes, and follow who was talking to who. I also thought the political and technological background were very generic. These characters and this story could have been placed in almost any timeframe and location. There wasn't anything about the story that makes it "sci-fi", particularly.

I discovered one interesting thing after reading the book. I looked at the copyright statement on the first page and discovered Mike Shepherd is a pseudonym for Mike Moscoe, who has written other stories in the same universe. I don't know why he changed names, unless his previous stuff has a bad reputation, but I haven't read any of it.

I am rather puzzled by the people comparing Kris Longknife to Elizabeth Moon's characters or to Honor Harrington. Honestly, from the first chapter, she struck me as a whiny little rich kid who seems to be magically able to lead troops, pilot planes and do virtually anything anyone throws at her without even blinking an eye. Somehow, despite being an ensign, she magically is the superior officer to everyone more than once. She single handedly saves her first mission. She can follow 5 conversations at once in a room and is an amazing politician. Everyone loves her unless they're just giving her a hard time for the sake of appearances. The words "you're one of those Longknives" appears at least once a chapter, which is tedious. I mean how many times do we have to get beaten over the head with the fact that she's amazing and rich and perfect? She comes off as a very typical wish-fulfillment character who manages to fix any problem without breaking a sweat. Honor Harrington at least had some real problems to deal with both emotionally and physically. She had self doubt and anxieties that weren't brushed away with a few convenient sentences and abuse of exclamation marks. Yeah, Honor manages to kick some serious butt, but at least she's a believable, well-rounded character and the world around her is described (to death) and developed. Too much in Mutineer is left conveniently unexplained or is passed off as inconsequential. The relationship Kris has with her parents seems very contrived and superficial, as are her relationships with pretty much everyone. Her family is described as insanely famous, but a bunch of them are thrown at us all at once without really explaining who they are except for cardboard, two dimensional characters whose only purpose is to make Kris look good by either explaining her behaviour to others or setting her up for doing something epic.

Part of this is the writing style, which I never really got into. It was pretty simplistic, had an overabundance of exclamation marks and random capitalization of things that may have been meant as jokes but that fell flat. I had this book recommended by Amazon.com when I purchased Tanya Huff's latest book from her Valor series and I am seriously disappointed that the bot was comparing Huff's witty, strong, amazing Gunnery Sergeant Kerr to the barbie-doll with no substance that is Kris Longknife. You may like this book if you enjoy mindless wish-fulfillment in a space-navy setting, but not if you actually want a strong, well-written character in a gripping story.