This is it—the big showdown! The war between the Kingdom of Manticore and the People’s Republic of Haven has come!
I’ve really been enjoying this series. Like I said in my review of On Basilisk Station, the Honorverse is what Star Trek wants to be when it grows up. Where Star Trek is campy, the Honorverse is polished. Where Star Trek is preachy, the Honorverse is nuanced. Where Star Trek relies on hand waving and technobabble, the Honorverse shines with complex, believable world-building and incredible attention to detail. And perhaps most importantly, where Star Trek characters do things that are head-shakingly stupid, the characters in the Honorverse all, for the most part, smart, capable people with very good reasons for everything they do.
In any case, while the third book wasn’t quite as good as the previous two, it did not disappoint. In terms of character development, this may have been the best book in the series so far. Honor Harrington confronts a bunch of her private demons in this book, including her near-rape at the hands of Pavel Yong, and Weber did a really good job of that. There was also no shortage of action, seeing as Honor commands one of the biggest and most ferocious RMN warships in the fleet, and goes head to head with the greatest existential threat to the kingdom itself.
That said, in some ways the ending felt… a little too perfect. There was very little of the underdog stuff that really drove the first book, and while the stakes were definitely high, and lots of people died, the way they pulled it off felt a little too flawless. Without getting into spoilers, this was especially true of the intrigue going on within the People’s Republic of Haven itself. There was definitely intrigue and subterfuge, but it didn’t feel complex enough, or messy enough, to really satisfy me. Everything lined up just a little too perfect.
That’s really my only complaint, though. There was no shortage of crowning moments, and some great come-uppances for the bad guys, especially Pavel Young. Quite a few tear-jerking moments as well, especially in the side stories and peripheral conflicts that didn’t involve Honor directly. More than just big guns and explosions, Weber really knows how to personalize a conflict and get you to feel deeply intimate with the characters. In that aspect, this was probably the best book in the series so far.
Great book, and immensely enjoyable, just like the previous two. I heartily recommend it.
I think I’m going to take a break from the Honorverse for a while. I do intend to come back to it eventually, but there’s a bunch of other similar stuff that I want to get to first, like House of Assassins, the Vorkosigan Saga, and David Gemmell’s Troy series. Baen stories are like a rich chocolate cake, and I can only take so many at a time—and yes, I know Gemmell was never a Baen author, but his books scratch the same itch for me. In fact, they may be the richest chocolate cake of them all.
