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Book review: A Mighty Fortress
Jun. 12th, 2010 05:51 pmToday's book review is A Mighty Fortress by David Weber.
This is book 4 of the Safehold series. It will make more sense to start at the beginning, but it probably provides enough recap to pretty much make sense on its own. It tells a complete episode, but still leaves the larger story in a very tense position.
This is a David Weber book. In the unlikely event that anyone reading this hasn't read any Weber, go dig up a copy of On Basilisk Station (Honor Harrington book 1); the Honor Harrington series is his best work. Like most of Weber's books, this is highly military, spending a lot of time examining the politics, intrigue, and human relationships that lead to wars and a fair bit of time in describing actual battles in fairly gruesome detail. It's too long, switching between too many viewpoint characters, and it gets uncomfortably graphic. It's also based on a rather hard to swallow initial premise and skates along on some fairly shaky ground to keep the world as premised from collapsing. People who don't like Weber, or who don't like this series, can make very long lists of bad things about this book, this series, or Weber's writing in general, and they're right in all the particulars. But there is still something about the stories as he presents them that makes them hard to put down, and this book has that quality. There's a lot of background infodump about how sailing ships, cannon, and naval strategy work, but it's actually less extreme than the last couple of books in the series. And, amid all the bluster and excitement, it manages to have something to say about the human condition.
8 out of 10.
( plot highlights )
This is book 4 of the Safehold series. It will make more sense to start at the beginning, but it probably provides enough recap to pretty much make sense on its own. It tells a complete episode, but still leaves the larger story in a very tense position.
This is a David Weber book. In the unlikely event that anyone reading this hasn't read any Weber, go dig up a copy of On Basilisk Station (Honor Harrington book 1); the Honor Harrington series is his best work. Like most of Weber's books, this is highly military, spending a lot of time examining the politics, intrigue, and human relationships that lead to wars and a fair bit of time in describing actual battles in fairly gruesome detail. It's too long, switching between too many viewpoint characters, and it gets uncomfortably graphic. It's also based on a rather hard to swallow initial premise and skates along on some fairly shaky ground to keep the world as premised from collapsing. People who don't like Weber, or who don't like this series, can make very long lists of bad things about this book, this series, or Weber's writing in general, and they're right in all the particulars. But there is still something about the stories as he presents them that makes them hard to put down, and this book has that quality. There's a lot of background infodump about how sailing ships, cannon, and naval strategy work, but it's actually less extreme than the last couple of books in the series. And, amid all the bluster and excitement, it manages to have something to say about the human condition.
8 out of 10.
( plot highlights )