TStarnes Book reviews

I will start off by saying I am generally a fan of all of Flints works, he writes the happiest war stories you will find.  His writing tends to be fairly up-beat, he loves over the top characters, and he enjoys not only showing the action and drama beats of his stories but also exploring the larger political and cultural landscapes of the worlds he creates.  This last trait of Flint’s is both a blessing and a curse.

Because he writes so much alternate history there are a lot of interesting points to examine however he also tends to get a bit “wander” in his writing.  Long tangents, dead end story treads, and convoluted setups that don’t really apply to the main story of the book can happen.

That being said while this book is very typically Flint the flow and pacing is much better then in some of his other series, the Ring of Fire jumps instantly to mind.  A big factor in this reigning in can be attributed to the smaller cast in this book with only a dozen characters to track rather than the thirty to forty characters in some of his other titles.  And the characters you do get are more likely to be integral to the plot limiting the unimportant tangents that can happen. The plot itself is also less convoluted and straighter forward, which is both good and bad.  The story is easy to follow but he has some trouble pulling off subtlety.

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Basilisk Station'. While Honor of the Queen falls a little short of its progenitor, it is still a solid read.  I enjoy military fiction, whether contemporary or sci-fi, when it is well done; and 'On Basilisk Station’ was done well.  This story is a bit less straight forward and has more drama attached to it with long standing personal relationships joining the butting head version of personal relationships initially seen in the previous installment.

Honor, who is still a little one dimensional, continues to be the strong, hyper-capable commander that Weber seems to prefer. The white hat wearing do not wrong type of character sometimes seen in military fiction can get a bit tedious so the fact that he allows her a small misstep is nice to see.  There is a nice stack of returning secondary characters, the ensemble cast being the life blood of an effective sci-fi series, generally continue to be enjoyable and I was happy to see Alistair back.  The addition of the Graysons and Masadans added a different point of view then we usually see in this type of story but the real star of the secondary characters was the father figure of Courvosier.  His presence adds a vulnerability that Honor did not have in the previous books.

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