Shadow of Freedom by David Weber
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
In a word: disappointing. In another word: lame. Frankly, this book sucked. I have given every Honor Harrington book except one five stars, but this barely deserves two. And I feel betrayed. First of all, as I was finishing Honor #13 not too long ago, I was reading reviews of it and a number of them mentioned Shadow of Freedom as being Honor #14, so I immediately ordered it. Lots of people referred to it as Honor #14. People reviewing THIS book — Shadow of Freedom — even refer to it as Honor #14. But it’s not. At all. All Honor books come with the words “an Honor Harrington novel,” or something to that effect, on the cover. This book says it’s part of the “Honorverse.” And when I listed it in Goodreads, it comes up as Saganami #3, an Honor sub-series that I haven’t read, one of at least two such sub-series’. So, imagine my shock when Honor herself doesn’t even appear in this book at all! She’s quoted a couple of times, I guess to make it an Honor-related book, but she’s nowhere to be found. Indeed, only one main character from the Honor series is in this book — Michelle Henke, who has her fleet in the Talbot Quadrant on the edges of the Solarian League. And this book is about her adventures, and the adventures of “independent” world rebels trying to throw off the yoke of Solarian sponsored oppression. The thing that makes it tricky is they’re contacted and given weapons by an agent who claims to represent Manticore, so they naturally assume the Manticorian Navy will come to their aid, all of them. However, he’s a Mesan Alliance agent and is trying to screw Manticore. There are a couple of mildly interesting scenes in the book, but it’s a short book and not too much happens, aside from the usual ungodly amounts of dialogue Weber throws into his books cause he’s apparently paid by the word count. He likes to double his books’ lengths by going dialogue-heavy. All that said, as others have pointed out, the truly damning thing about this book is that at least two chapters are literal total cut and paste chapters from previous Honor books, and that’s unforgivable. Weber doesn’t even have the decency to try and mix them up just a little; he holds his readers in that much disdain. What an asshole. Honestly, Weber can write awesome stories and great battle scenes, but I’ve decided that he must be a royal asshole as a person and I truly don’t like him at all, even as I eagerly await all of his new Honor and Safehold novels. And I hate myself for it. This book is most definitely NOT recommended.
hankrules2011 