| $@%&! level: Low “Bedroom” level: None Violence level: Low (unless you count the deaths of a couple of hexpuma) Back Cover: “Stephanie Harrington always expected to be a forest ranger on her homeworld of Meyerdahl...until her parents relocated to the frontier planet of Sphinx in the distant Star Kingdom of Manticore. It should have been the perfect new home—a virgin wilderness full of new species of every sort, just waiting to be discovered. But Sphinx is a far more dangerous place than ultra-civilized Meyerdahl, and Stephanie's explorations come to a sudden halt when her parents lay down the law: no unsupervised trips into the wild! Yet Stephanie is a young woman determined to make discoveries, and the biggest one of all awaits her: an intelligent alien species. The forest-dwelling treecats are small, cute, smart, and have a pronounced taste for celery. And they are also very, very deadly when they or their friends are threatened...as Stephanie discovers when she comes face-to-face with Sphinx's most lethal predator.” |
This is definitely a much more Young Adult level of novel. (And I say that with the utmost respect for young adults and the novels written with them in mind. Many of my favorites come from that section of the library.) To start with, Stephanie is a precocious teenager who saves the day, and the plot is a great deal less earth-shattering. This is important stuff, and Stephanie manages to save many lives, but there's never any danger of the entire planet being nuked or anything, the way Stephanie's many-times-great grandaughter has to deal with. There isn't even a body count, which is practically unheard of for David Weber. You could also say it's pointed toward the young adult audience because it's so much about the treecats. Yes, they're very deadly when they need to be, but they tend to get classified (at least in my mind) as the unicorns and fairies of the Honorverse. Treecats are the magical animal companions that show up so often in fantasy novels, so it's an interesting change to see them in sci-fi. And I must say they do it really well. And David Weber never even fell into his frequent habit of stopping the action for a couple of pages to explain what's going on.
So what we've got here is basically two stories (both of which climax with a hexpuma getting killed, but in very different circumstances, so don't worry about it being redundant). The first story is the process of Stephanie discovering the existence of the treecats, finding out as much about them as she can, and eventually earning a certain level of trust from them (cue the first hexpuma). The second story happens a few years later and sets up the problem of what humanity is going to do about the treecats. It's a bit of a break in the story-line, but not really a problem. And the antagonist is sufficiently malevolent to deserve everything he gets in the end. It's a new kind of dynamic for the Honorverse as well, having the treecats' point of view and getting to see them talk and work together, because it's the lack of communication between humans and treecats that sort of allows the suspense of the story to grow. If it weren't for that inability to understand one another, Stephanie and her family would have figured everything out and solved the problem pretty darn quick, but because the 'cats can't just tell them, it gets dragged out longer. As a reader, I actually kind of enjoy that feeling of knowing what the problem is and mentally urging the characters to figure it out. I got a lot of that here.