Relax wrote:Is it any good? I saw zero posts on the topic and I find that odd for this forum...
Haven't been around for several months and well...
It does start off(free chapters at Baen.com) with a court scene and politics... Not exactly YA material
Is there a box set version? (HAHA->I know there won't be but it is last book of series) But if there was I might actually buy all 5 and send them to my niece/nephews who are about the right age.
EDIT: Saw the other thread(did not read as I do not want spoilers) just rather overall impressions. I know, this choir will always say it is good but...
Ok, no-spoiler review:
I liked the book, but so far I haven't found a David Weber book (collaboration or not) I haven't liked. But I can say I enjoyed this one more than the previous installment,
A New Clan. It's a nice new entry in the Star Kingdom series focusing on Stephanie Harrington.
This is a Young Adult novel, not Military Sci-Fi, so as usual don't expect space battles. There's something about the Alignment, which you must know already because it's been in the blurb about the book and the Prologue focuses on it, which you can read for free in the Amazon ebook sample. I won't spoil any details, but you won't be surprised we don't have a resolution in this intrigue yet... obviously, because it isn't resolved even 400 T-years in the future.
Unlike the previous books, this is not a detective story. There's still some investigative work done, but that's not the main story background this time.
As a Young Adult novel, it focuses on Stephanie and her relations with her friends and family. Now she's no longer a kid beginning her teens and reckless as teens are wont to be. Instead, she's really a young adult, nearing on 18 T-years of age (her B-day is a chapter in the book), learning responsibilities that an adult must have. That court scene - a follow up to the short story in the last Anthology - is part of that: adults have responsibilities.
The book also devotes some time to another character who's had a pretty rough childhood and how they're overcoming such difficulties that had shaped their character but are now making different decisions, becoming a different person. I found that section pretty powerful. It's only got me thinking of those people who don't overcome such problems, becoming bitter, closed off, or become themselves the problems to others that they were. You find out who this character is in the first couple of chapters.
Finally, there's some progress on the Great Treecat Conspiracy. It's not a spoiler that this will eventually end in the Ninth Amendment to the Manticore Constitution. It's also no spoiler to know that by Honor's time, the Galaxy at large does not know much about treecats, including the Alignment. And we know from
Toll of Honor that Tennessee Bolgeo will make a redemption arc comeback... though it doesn't yet happen in this book. If there's one frustration with this book, it's that the GTC doesn't advance enough, which has got to mean there will be more books. My feeling is that David and Jane have already written most of the next one.
How far they will go with the series is a good question. The Ninth Amendment is pretty far in the future, so Stephanie wouldn't be a young adult herself any more by then - she'd be 61 T-years old. I don't think we'll see the Amendment as part of the SK series, or at least not more than Epilogue to the last book. Unless there's some retconning of the date, what we'll probably see are legislative acts in Sphinx and in the SK as a whole that are precursors to the Amendment, which Stephanie, Karl, Tennessee and, who knows, some Alignment agents will take part on!
