| $@%&! level: High “Bedroom” level: Low Violence level: High Back Cover: “Honor Harrington has faced ship-to-ship combat, assassins, political vendettas, and duels. She's been shot at, shot down, and just plain shot, had starships blown out from under her, and made personal enemies who will do anything to ruin her, and she's survived it all. But this time the People's Republic of Haven has finally found an admiral who can win battles, and Honor's orders take her straight into an ambush. Outnumbered and outgunned, she has just two options: see the people under her command slaughtered in hopeless battle...or surrender them—and herself—to the Peeps. At least the People's Navy promises to treat its prisoners honorably. But the Navy is overruled by the politicians, and Honor finds herself aboard a Peep battlecruiser, bound for a prison planet aptly named 'Hell'...and her scheduled execution. Put into solitary confinement, separated from her officers and her treecat Nimitz, and subjected to systematic humiliation by her gaolers, her future has become both bleak and short. Yet the one lesson Honor Harrington has never learned is how to give up.” |
It all starts off fairly placidly. There’s peaceful travelling scenes, the taking up of new responsibilities, character and relationship development, and so forth. Also, the treecats decide to start colonization by convincing Honor to relocate a bunch of them to Grayson. And then the beginning of the tragedy--Honor falls in love. Now, that generally isn’t such a bad thing, you would think, but in this case, it precipitates everything that happens to Honor for the remainder of this book and the next. All the excitement really begins about halfway through, and goes on with barely a lull to a literally explosive ending. The big difference is that this time instead of running space battles between starships, it’s Honor and her people escaping from an enemy starship--and blowing it right up in the process. And the really interesting thing is that it’s all planned by a certain Senior Chief Petty Officer with a habit for unconventional ideas. In fact, Honor herself barely gets to even hit anybody, but manages to be boss awesome even so. Gotta love her mental judo.
The truth is that most of the time, I quite happily skip to the end, where the actual escape begins. Although the rest of it is interesting and even exciting, the end is where it really gets good. Just one word of advice, though--if you’re reading it for the first time, have the next one handy because you’re going to want it. Actually, that might be true even if you’re reading it for the tenth time.