Baen, 2006, 368 pages
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5561-2
Read March 2018, age 39
This is book 5 of a series of which I'd read the first four years ago, and I didn't particularly like. In the first four books of the Starfire series the space battles were numerous and really well-done, but there wasn't really enough plot or characterization to hold everything together.
For this book, the main author, David Weber, dropped out and Steve White moved into the main name on the cover, with a new secondary author in Shirley Meier. The style of book drastically changed, as well - in this one, I found the character arcs much improved, and the work on the villains was quite good, but the space battles weren't near so good.
My biggest gripe is that the authors spend a lot of time gleefully re-visiting characters from the previous books and it felt like I should already love these characters and be excited that they were back. Instead, what I remembered were cardboard cutouts acting as proxies for the authors' strategies in a thinly-veiled tabletop space wargaming sessions. I didn't care about the characters, and I found myself mostly irritated by the re-introductions. I also found myself not knowing enough about the strategies or tactics involved, so the space battles became pretty much just heaps of jargon thrown around until one side or another was declared a victor.
It might have helped to have read the prequels in recent memory, but I'm not completely convinced.
It also didn't help that this was primarily a set-up book, with next to nothing resolved. I'm told that this will improve by the next book. I guess we'll see.
Definitely mixed feelings about this book. If it and it's sequel hadn't been recommended, I probably wouldn't continue.
Rating: 2
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